Wikivoyage:Script nominations/Archive

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This is an archive of past discussions. 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 talk page.

The following scripts have passed through Project:Script nominations.

Kunibotto

(WT-ja) Kunibotto will be used for automated uploads of CIA flags, maps and article stubs for all countries into the Japanese Wikivoyage. Pywikipediabot's upload.py will be used. This is a one-time run, but I expect to use variants of this to enter great big chunks of Japan later on. (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:57, 14 Jul 2005 (EDT)

I'll vote yes. That said, maybe we should set things up so that images can be shared between the language versions... -- (WT-en) Mark 10:47, 14 Jul 2005 (EDT)
A Wikivoyage Commons? I'm all for it, now to find the hardware, the software and the maintainer... (WT-en) Jpatokal 13:27, 15 Jul 2005 (EDT)
Huh? Why wouldn't we just host it on the wikivoyage.org server, with the same software and technology as Wikivoyage? MediaWiki 1.4.x has a lot of support for a media commons. --(WT-en) Evan 13:30, 15 Jul 2005 (EDT)
You tell me, boss, it's not the first time this has been proposed! (WT-en) Jpatokal 13:47, 15 Jul 2005 (EDT)
The answer, then, is no reason. I've been looking at the code for MediaWiki's commons system and I think it would be a pretty straightforward thing to build without even taking down the running server. --(WT-en) Evan 13:52, 15 Jul 2005 (EDT)
Yes, but please follow the policy. Slow updates, use a flag to turn the bot on/off, etc. It's not that hard, I don't think, and it's easier on the Wikivoyage servers. It's also easier to stop a bot that's got a bug in it, and to clean up after it. Thanks. --(WT-en) Evan 13:34, 15 Jul 2005 (EDT)
Uploads are being done once per minute, which is in line with policy, no? The flag-double-check thing would if anything only increase the load, although I'll admit that the real reason I was too lazy to implement it is that I'm not very familiar with Python and would need to spend an hour or two peering at the uncommented entrails of pywikipediabot to see how to do this. But I'll be wilfully evil and let the flag uploader run its course first, the data set is sufficiently well-defined that the risk of running amok is rather minimal. (WT-en) Jpatokal 13:47, 15 Jul 2005 (EDT)
Please, don't make a habit of it. Neither you nor I nor any other admin are above the policies and guidelines of Wikivoyage. In fact, we have a responsibility to set a good example. I don't think anything in the policy is too difficult to implement in any modern scripting language.
If you'd like to change the policy, let's work that out on Project:Script policy. If you can't be arsed to make changes to the script to work with local requirements, or you're simply not experienced enough with the code to do so, then you probably shouldn't be running the script in the first place. I'd be happy to help with the pywikipediabot changes to make the framework work with the double-check. --(WT-en) Evan 15:32, 17 Jul 2005 (EDT)
For the record, Kunibotto's now cleaned up its act and dutifully checks the Run pages like a good 'bot should. (WT-en) Jpatokal 06:38, 2 Aug 2005 (EDT)

So for the record, Kunibotto is now doing its last run (?) to pump all CIA flags and maps into Wikivoyage Shared. One upload every 60+ seconds, so it'll take most of the day... (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:45, 7 May 2006 (EDT)

SpellingScript

I'd like to create a script that does automatic spelling corrections. It would use the Spelling maintenance page to find pages with spelling mistakes listed in the list of common misspellings, then change those pages to use the correct spelling. It would not change a) anything capitalized (probably a proper name) b) anything in the foreign-language part of a phrasebook, c) anything in italics (probably a foreign word), and d) any page linked from a special page (maybe User:(WT-en) SpellingScript/Ignore), so people can override it. This would improve the readability and apparent quality of the site, and take away one of the more tedious tasks for users. The script would probably be run from a cron job on the Wikivoyage server -- maybe once per day. Note: this script isn't written yet. --(WT-en) Evan 19:24, 10 Jan 2004 (EST)

I'd like to second the nomination. -- (WT-en) Mark 09:50, 6 Feb 2004 (EST)
I third the nomination. It's worth a try. -(WT-en) phma 21:44, 17 Feb 2004 (EST)

Wechselbot

This script would read a list of pages and a list of currencies, then edit each of those pages, looking for comments that mark a number as an exchange rate, then updating the exchange rate. This would improve the usefulness of the site (go to any country page and get the current exchange rate) without burdening anyone with updating them. The script could be run once a day or once a week from my laptop. This script isn't written yet, but I do have a shell script that gets the exchange rate of any other currency against the USD. -(WT-en) phma 21:44, 17 Feb 2004 (EST)

Seems like an interesting idea. What would the base currancy be? USD? Since I live in Switzerland I guess I would have to vote for CHF... of course Evan and MAJ are in Canada, so they might have a different point of view... ;) Really though if all the script did was to put Xcurrency = USD at the bottom that would probably be fine, especially if it was always marked as a minor edit. -- (WT-en) Mark 01:35, 23 Feb 2004 (EST)
The comment would look like <!--wb:chf/cad-->. The base is USD, because that's what finance.yahoo.com uses as a base; after gathering all the exchange rates, the bot computes the ratios as needed. -(WT-en) phma 08:01, 23 Feb 2004 (EST)
OK, so just to be sure I've got this the script would look for a number after (or is it before?) a comment like the one above. It also sounds like you want to have a page of exchange rates per currency which we could link to from the pages for places where that currency is used. So it isn't like the bot would look for these tags all over the place right? In that case I think it's a great idea! -- (WT-en) Mark 09:58, 23 Feb 2004 (EST)

Wechselbot would:

  1. Read a list of currency codes from a page.
  2. Get the current exchange rates from finance.yahoo.com. This takes one web access; that's why I want it to read the list first.
  3. Read the list of pages to edit.
  4. Read a page, look for comments followed by numbers, and change the numbers to the current exchange rates.
  5. Repeat until it has done all the pages.

The comment could also contain the number of significant digits and the Unicode offset of the digit zero (in case on the Hindi, Arabic, or Thai Wikivoyage we want to write numbers in the native script). -(WT-en) phma 15:45, 23 Feb 2004 (EST)

Better late than never, but you do get an answer -- As far as I understand it this is not a bad idea at all. I was thinking a step further: as I'm using the Euro, an amount in USD gives me an idea of the value, but if I want to know the precise amount I still have to convert it manually. How about a way to indicate in my user preferences that I want to use the Euro as a base? You would set your preferences to the USD, somebody else might set it to GBP, etc. Of course, this would involve a change to the code. (WT-en) DhDh 17:02, 5 Mar 2004 (EST)
If I understand you right, an arbitrary value (such as the price of a ticket from Györ to Debrecen in Magyar forintok) would be preceded by a tag saying that it's in some currency (HUF), and the PHP script would then display it in EUR, GBP, USD, AUD, CAD, ZAR, or NZD, depending on your preference. (Anonyms and people with no preference would get the forint currency.) This would require an exchange rate table. The table can be maintained by the bot as described previously; the PHP script would have to know where it is. Any change to the code would require getting Evan involved. -(WT-en) phma 19:24, 5 Mar 2004 (EST)
That is indeed what I mean. But in your example the HUF amount would not disappear. The amount in your chosen currency would be added to that. Like this:
  • no preference/anonym: 456 HUF
  • preference = EUR: 456 HUF (45 EUR)
  • preference = USD: 456 HUF (56 USD)
(I have no idea of the HUF exchange rate...) (WT-en) DhDh 19:51, 5 Mar 2004 (EST)
It sounded to me like the orginal idea was not to try to do automatic conversions on actual destination pages, but rather to make special pages with conversion tables which travelers could print out and carry around. I don't frankly like the idea of a script like this mucking with prices on the destination pages at all, for a couple of reasons.
  • A bug would cause waaaaaayyyy more damage, which somebody would have to take time to clean up after.
  • At the acutal destination prices will be listed in the local currency, so that's the way they should be listed on the destination page too.
  • Changing all of the pages with a script all the time will make a great big mess out of the Special:RecentChanges.
  • Having a user preference for their own local currency as above would make the feature work better, but would probably require some intensive hacking of the MediaWiki software, where a simple script which deals with a limited set of currency table pages would be a lot quicker.
On the other hand, I am in full support of the idea of doing a set of currency conversion pages with a script, even though currencies are not destinations. Maybe (WT-en) phma should make a demonstration page in his workspace to show us what he had in mind. -- (WT-en) Mark 14:22, 6 Mar 2004 (EST)
May I make a user page for Wechselbot and start writing the script? -(WT-en) phma 17:44, 7 Mar 2004 (EST)
Of course you can. Of course the safest thing to do (IMO) is t do this in your own namespace. For instance you can make some pages like: User:(WT-en) PierreAbbat/Wechselbot to play with. That said, If you think the script needs it's own login, then OK, go for it (again IMO) -- (WT-en) Mark 18:20, 7 Mar 2004 (EST)
The script needs its login; this is required by script policy. -(WT-en) phma
I don't know PHP, but I'm not sure that my idea would require intensive hacking. The feature should be able to search currencies in a 2-dimensional lookup table (the currency used in the article and the one in your preferences) and take the corresponding value to your screen. Somebody who knows PHP should contradict me if I'm wrong. (WT-en) DhDh 03:14, 7 Mar 2004 (EST)

Once the script is written, can I upload it to the arch server so that others can use it as a basis for their own scripts? -(WT-en) phma 22:57, 7 Mar 2004 (EST)

W66InterwikiBot

Per the request for interwiki links for World66, I'd like to run a bot to jump start this process. Since their file names are irregular and use a hierarchy (ie /texas/paris and /france/paris) it's going to be doing some fuzzy matching/guessing but I'll start with the easy/exact matches first (I've aready got ~2k or so done). I'll set up a (WT-en) Sandbox with examples. (WT-en) Majnoona 14:26, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

The bot, she is ready to run. I'm going to start with some small batches this evening. (WT-en) Majnoona 17:26, 19 July 2006 (EDT)
Sorry my bot is being a spaz... I swear it works perfect under my User:(WT-en) Maj/Sandbox! I will tinker offline until I get the bug (it's stripping all the returns) worked out... sorry! (WT-en) Majnoona 22:23, 19 July 2006 (EDT)
We're back! I'll be running it in small batches so as not to flood recent changes... (WT-en) Maj 13:20, 27 July 2006 (EDT)


-- (WT-en) Dorgan 09:48, 10 July 2007 (EDT)

Support. The functionality is identical to the deceased and much missed InterLangBot, and the cough test run just now shows that it seems to work fine, so I propose we waive the 7-day waiting period if Evan is willing to toggle the bot switches (this being one of those few bureaucrat-only tasks). One question though: does the bot handle UTF8 properly? Can it run in Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew etc as well? (WT-en) Jpatokal 10:00, 10 July 2007 (EDT)
Yes, it's UTF-8, and working fine, and of course, its working other languages. The source is (WT-hu) here! (wikivoyage_family.py) (WT-en) Dorgan 10:16, 10 July 2007 (EDT)
You also need to hack wikipedia.py to check the bot flags -- see . (WT-en) Jpatokal 12:15, 10 July 2007 (EDT)
I understand. My problem is: I cracked that file, I copied it to wikipedia.py and it doesn't work. I think this crack is out of date and unfortunatelly I can't resolve to check the two pages. And in interwiki there is another problem too: if my main language is hungarian, and I set the two pages in hu wt (if it's working :)) how can you stop me if you don't know the main language? OR if you know, how can I know the stop isn't an affray (if anonymous)? Could you review the script policy? The STOP is for the admins I think (like wps too)! (WT-en) Dorgan 03:57, 11 July 2007 (EDT)
The bot is supposed to check the flags on the language version it's currently editing. The code above is very simple, all you need to do is change the URLs to point to User:(WT-en) DorganBot/Run and Project:Script policy/Run. (WT-en) Jpatokal 04:35, 11 July 2007 (EDT)
Yes, I know, I chaged that, and nothing.... (WT-en) Dorgan 04:49, 11 July 2007 (EDT)
Ok, my last question: yes I know, that's not wp, but I think interwiki bot isn't dangerous. You see I have a bot since 2006 nov (in en, it, ro, ru, nl, fi, fr, de, hu wikipedias) more than 13 000 edits just in hu (the most edits are interwiki!). So I couldn't resolve the two check page, but Can I have the bot flag? :) (WT-en) Dorgan 04:09, 11 July 2007 (EDT)
It's not a question of is it dangerous. The question is, does it follow Wikivoyage policy? If not, then we either 1) don't let it run on Wikivoyage, or we 2) ignore policy in this case, or 3) we change the policy. My opinion: maybe we should drop the onerous article-checking requirements of our current script policy, so that useful tools like the pywikipediabot suite will be compliant. I think that we've got enough admins around that blocking ill-behaved bots is practical. --(WT-en) Evan 19:41, 15 July 2007 (EDT)
Not yet. I'd like to know that it's working according to our Project:script policy. I'm going to look over the code. --(WT-en) Evan 10:43, 10 July 2007 (EDT)
Since the bot has previously seemed to work OK, and Evan's not around too much these days, and the comment above is pretty ambiguous anyway, and this discussion has been dragging on for way too long, I'm going to tentatively say that the bot is approved — we'll just block it if there are problems. (WT-en) Jpatokal 13:09, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
Does anybody have an idea what has happend to this bot? It did a really good job, unfortunatly no edits any more since March 2008. --(WT-en) Flip666 writeme! • 05:13, 10 February 2009 (EST)


DiscoverBot

So, I'd like to cook up a little botlet to update Project:Discover and Template:Discover) automatically. It'll be simple enough to implement (and will probably reuse the relevant bits of StatScript) — just delete the first item in the upcoming queue, place it into the top slot in the template and autoarchive the last one. I'll try to add some logic to make it stop and complain if for whatever reason it can't find the bot-readable tags it's looking for. —The preceding comment was added by (WT-en) Jpatokal (talk • contribs)

What would it do about adding DotM/CotW trivium that BotH and I categorized? - (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 01:47, 23 June 2006 (EDT)
It would merrily ignore them. However, if entries are chewed up at a precise rate of 1 per 24 hours, elementary differential calculus will let you synchronize DOTMage and related discoveries. We could change the list type from * to # to make this even easier. (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:51, 23 June 2006 (EDT)
I'm wooed. Let me ask one more question so that I can make sure I do understand. The bot will ignore CotW/DotM trivium, unless we change the script to take listings from "#DOTM trivia"? - (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 01:57, 23 June 2006 (EDT)
Yup. Basically, I'll just stick in a tag that says <!-- Eat me --> or equivalent, and the bot will munch on the next line (unless it says "don't eat me"). (WT-en) Jpatokal 02:34, 23 June 2006 (EDT)
Bump. I need another admin's support for this... (WT-en) Jpatokal 21:28, 30 June 2006 (EDT)
Support. Sorry, I didn't realize it was you asking for this, so I didn't realize you were ready. -- (WT-en) Colin 21:41, 30 June 2006 (EDT)
Support. Also didn't realize you were ready - I was waiting to see if there was going to be a test version or some such first. -- (WT-en) Ryan 21:47, 30 June 2006 (EDT)
Oh. It's not ready, but I thought the first step was to get approval -- not much point in writing a bot only to have it shot down, no? Will try to squeeze in a few hours tomorrow to write it up, shouldn't be too hard. (WT-en) Jpatokal 00:15, 1 July 2006 (EDT)
Support. Sounds like a good one to me. --(WT-en) Evan 01:24, 1 July 2006 (EDT)
(WT-en) DiscoverBot has been unleashed on the unsuspecting citizens of Wikivoyage to wreck wild crazy robot havoc every night at UTC+01. (WT-en) Jpatokal 04:03, 11 July 2006 (EDT)

StatScript

Runs once a week to update Project:Multilingual statistics automatically, once working can be extended to all language versions. I plan to deploy in stages:

  1. Fetch the stats data automatically
  2. Format into table row automatically
  3. Place new row into table automatically
  4. Place new row into table for all language versions

This doesn't exist either but I'm working on it. I will also need to create a Project:NumberOfArticles page in each language version that will simply contain {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} as content, so I don't need to deal with customized Special:Statistics pages. (WT-en) Jpatokal 11:10, 27 Oct 2004 (EDT)

Stages 1 and 2 exist now → User:(WT-en) Jpatokal/StatScript. Stages 3 & 4 shall await admin approval because they actually edit pages instead of just reading them. (WT-en) Jpatokal 12:43, 27 Oct 2004 (EDT)
I think this sounds like a good idea for a script. How often do you plan to run it? --(WT-en) Evan 16:35, 27 Oct 2004 (EDT)
Once a week, early Friday morning UTC. (WT-en) Jpatokal 22:41, 27 Oct 2004 (EDT)
I think this sounds like a good idea, so I vote yes. Do I need to express that elsewhere as well? -- (WT-en) Mark 19:16, 28 Oct 2004 (EDT)
I vote yes. -(WT-en) phma 21:58, 28 Oct 2004 (EDT)

FYI, after being moribund for a long time (I was only running the first half manually), I've finally written up the last chunk with the pywikipedia framework and set it on autopilot. So it should now run automatically every Friday at 00:00 UTC. (WT-en) Jpatokal 21:47, 18 Aug 2005 (EDT)

Hotelmakerbot

So I have this evil (WT-en) hotelmaker script which goes and scrapes various hotel websites to generate entries. Some people have populated various USA articles using this data source. Each time I run the script, my formatting improves, some hotels go away, and some hotels appear. I'd like to write a script to help keep the entries up to date. It will

  1. edit all US articles for which a hotel is found in the hotelmaker database
  2. if the Sleep section contains an out-of-date set of hotelmaker entries, the Sleep section will be replaced with a modernized version of the entries.
  3. the new entries will use the new <sleep> tags

In the future I might get fancier about things (note: this nomination does not give permission for any fancier versions), but for right now I want to update old entries and nothing else, so my script will not make an edit if any of the following are true:

  • a hotel was manually added to the list
  • a hotel was removed from the list
  • any formatting changes were made that might need to be preserved.

My main motivation here is to jump ahead of (WT-en) Jani and get this done before he makes a bot which converts sleep entries to the new listings tag style because that will make it hard for me to write an updater bot in the future. -- (WT-en) Colin 03:00, 6 November 2006 (EST)

DorganBot (was: InterLangBot)

On the German site, most articles have an inter-language link only to the English version. At the other hand, the corresponding English articles don't know about their German counterparts. I'd like to write a little robot that does the following:

  1. It runs through a list of German articles and reads out their inter-language link to the English site.
  2. It puts an appropriate inter-language link to the German site on every English article it finds this way.
  3. At the same time, it looks for other inter-language links in the English article and adds them to the German article.
This way, both, the English and the German version (and other language versions, too) would stay in good contact and are kept well linked. You may say, all that could also be done manualy. Well, basicaly, you are right. But who is going to do all that boring work? -- (WT-en) Hansm 16:33, 2004 Oct 21 (EDT)
    • This sounds good. It would need to exclude the twin pages links that aren't interlanguage links (WikiPedia, Dmoz). I'd be willing to make the informal rule that interlanguage links always start with a lowercase letter (en:, sv:, fr:, de:, ro:) and are three letters or longer, and that other sites start with an uppercase letter and are four letters or more. Sound fair? --(WT-en) Evan 17:02, 21 Oct 2004 (EDT)
    • For its first run, I'd prefer to hardcode the 5 country codes. I want to keep the bot as easy as possible in order to avoid disasterous disfunctions. When the bot runs fine, more advanced configuration features could be built in later. In a first investigation, I have found out that some existing inter-language links point to empty pages. The reason for that is eather a broken link or a link to a planed, but still empty article. The question is, what to do with this links. Delete those links or keep them? -- (WT-en) Hansm 14:24, 2004 Oct 24 (EDT)
      • Delete. Broken links are useless, and the links will be recreated once somebody notices the problem. Of course, you could just record the list of broken links and post it somewhere for manual correction... (WT-en) Jpatokal 11:02, 27 Oct 2004 (EDT)
    • Just as a point of order -- I'm not sure that we've achieved the two-administrator rule here, so I've temporarily set the InterLangBot's run to "no". We have me giving support, and Hansm gives support, but he's a) the originator of the idea and b) an admin on a different language version. This policy was created before we had multiple language versions, so it's not clear if non-en: admins count. And for Project:administrator nominations I think we ended up saying that you needed two other admins to give support, if the nominator was an admin him/herself. Anyways, I'm just soliciting opinions. If another en: admin could pop in and give their thumbs-up, though, it's a moot point. --(WT-en) Evan 17:01, 28 Oct 2004 (EDT)
      • Evan, I understand your point, and at the other hand I don't. The script is nominated for one week. I have asked in the pup for some other admin to give a comment. If admins don't care about, what should I do? Either there are too less admins here, or the rules shouldn't be taken too serious. Anyway, this error that has produced editings in the main page is realy painfull and I'm sorry about it. I hope I can fix it before it would happen once more. -- (WT-en) Hansm 18:10, 2004 Oct 28 (EDT)
        • What you should do is wait. Sorry, but it's not so urgent that it can't stand another 24 hours of talking and decision making. --(WT-en) Evan 13:50, 29 Oct 2004 (EDT)
    • Oops.. sorry. I haven't been paying attention to this page. Here's your second admin vote: Yes. Sounds like a good script. Meanwhile use the perl Module for this if it's written in perl... and make me keep it up to date.. ;) -- (WT-en) Mark 19:19, 28 Oct 2004 (EDT)
    • Ditto... it gets my vote... will it just be for German at first or all languages? (WT-en) Majnoona 20:35, 28 Oct 2004 (EDT)
    • I think it's a good idea. It needs to be tested more than StatScript, as it modifies many pages, and it's not clear how to test it on the test wiki, since it needs two language versions to do anything useful. So test it carefully. -(WT-en) phma 21:58, 28 Oct 2004 (EDT)
    • Thanks to all of you for your pro vote. Marc, the script is already written and I must confess that I didn't remember you wix module. Be sure I will consult it next time. It's better to use some well tested standards than always beginning from scratch, as I did. I know, the InterLangBot is a critical mission since testing is only possible in its real ambience. What Evan has blocked was not the attempt to run the bot, but only my testings. Some more will follow before I realy will start it. -- (WT-en) Hansm 03:01, 2004 Oct 29 (EDT)

The InterLnagBot is running now. -- (WT-en) Hansm 04:11, 2004 Oct 29 (EDT) Run of (WT-en) InterLangBot completed. About 400 en: articles should have got new links to their de: couterparts, of course, many of them are still stubs. Some broken links to fr: and ro: have been deleted und some few inconsistent links have been encountered, but left untouched. If you should find some mistakes made by the bot, please let me know by reporting them on the InterLangBot's talk page. -- (WT-en) Hansm 03:48, 2004 Oct 30 (EDT)

Instead of reinventing the wheel (and promptly forgetting it), Pywikipediabot has an advanced, well-used bot for doing this already. I'll try to set this up to run automatically at some point. (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:57, 14 Jul 2005 (EDT)

---

My old InterLangBot has a serious problem: It cannot handle UTF-8 characters than cannot be mapped onto iso-latin-1 encoding. Since we have a ja: language version, it has no big use any more.

I have tried to customize the interwiki.py bot from the Pywikipediabot framework in order to comply our needs on Wikivoyage. The advantage would be to set up on a well maintained program that is kept up to date when version changes of wikimedia software are done. But there are some problems, too:

  • I don't see any way to keep the WikiPedia links at the bottom of the list without doing massive changes in the source. Does it matter if they get shifted to the top?
  • Handeling our very special script blocking policy saying that scripts have to stop when certain pages have an other contence than 'yes' doesn't make things easyer, but there could be a way by doing only minor changes in the bot's code. Jpatokal's approach could by generalized to all of our 6 languages. I see a way without changing wikipedia.py, what is one of the core files of the framework. Instead, a slight modification of interwiki.py needed to be done.
  • An other problem is that the mediawiki messages are switched off at Wikivoyage, but the wikipedia.py, and so interwiki.py, too, relie on them. There seems to be only one possibilty to get rid of that problem, that is changing one line in the source. The trade off would be that edit conflicts and other irregular problems could not be handled any more, then. Nevertheless, this might be a minor problem.

Generaly, changes at the sources of Pywikipediabot are problematic since they get lost with updates.

Now the most problematic question to all of you: How important is it that the WikiPedia link is at the bottom? -- (WT-en) Hansm 19:06, 16 Oct 2005 (EDT)

You mean that the WikiPedia link is still kept, but it just changes position in the list? Is it because capital W goes before lowercase a-z in an alphabetical sort? (WT-en) Jpatokal 20:35, 16 Oct 2005 (EDT)
Yes, the WikiPedia Link is still kept at the top of the "other languages" list. But It's not for the capital W. The WikiPedia link cannont be treated as normal interwiki link like language version. So, the WikiPedia link is the last part of the article that remains after all interwiki links have first been removed and then added at the end of the page. -- (WT-en) Hansm 00:57, 17 Oct 2005 (EDT)

Maybe, a realy dirty hack in wikipedia.py could be a solution for the WikiPedia Link problem. See User talk:(WT-en) InterLangBot for more. -- (WT-en) Hansm 15:31, 17 Oct 2005 (EDT)


Tatatabot

I've started to operate this bot on Japanese version, and I can contribute to English version as a substitute for DorganBot.

  • Operator: ja:User:(WT-ja) Tatata((WT-en) Tatata)
  • Function:
    • maintaining interlanguage links
    • replacing text (templates / internal links)
  • Operation: manually
  • Software: Python
  • Bot flags: ja

On English version, I'll use only the function of maintaining interlanguage links by myself. As to the function of replacing text, it will be used by request if someone needs help.

By the way, I would like to use this bot on Chinese version too. But there are no documents about script nor script nomination process because there is only one admin. ;-) Can I apply a bot flag for Chinese version here? -- (WT-en) Tatata 22:03, 27 April 2009 (EDT)

  • Support -- this is long overdue! And yes, I'll be happy to enable the bot flag on fi and zh. (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:09, 28 April 2009 (EDT)
Thank you Jani-san. I created some accounts ((WT-en) en, (WT-fi) fi, (WT-zh) zh) and /Run page (zh:Project:腳本方針/Run). How can I spell "Script policy" in Suomi? "Komentosarja käytännöt", right? -- (WT-en) Tatata 21:16, 29 April 2009 (EDT)
Bot flags enabled on fi, zh. There's no good Finnish word for "script" in this sense (komentosarja is a manual command sequence), so the policy page is now at fi:Project:Botit ("Bots") and the flag at fi:Project:Botit/Run. (WT-en) Jpatokal 02:48, 30 April 2009 (EDT)
I moved Chinese page from "zh:Wikivoyage:腳本方針/Run" to "zh:Project:機器人方針/Run", because of the same reason though I cannot understand Chinese well ;-)
The bot has started working on fi, zh! -- (WT-en) Tatata 22:14, 30 April 2009 (EDT)
  • Support. I'm so tired of marking interwiki links as patrolled :-) -- (WT-en) Colin 02:51, 30 April 2009 (EDT)
Thank you Colin-san. -- (WT-en) Tatata 22:14, 30 April 2009 (EDT)

The bot got a flag and started working on en:. Thank you!

Now, I'm requesting bot flag on de: and fr:. Unfortunately, noone come to script nomination page of both language versions. ;-) -- (WT-en) Tatata 22:08, 6 May 2009 (EDT)

Nice work, Tatata! (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 22:36, 6 May 2009 (EDT)

VolkovBot

This interwiki bot uses standard pywikipedia framework and is operated by wikipedia:ru:User:Volkov (sysop @ ru.wiki) on many WikiMedia projects. I think it will be helpful to keep an eye on interwikis on wikivoyage as well and update them when needed. The bot is supposed to be run periodically. --(WT-en) Volkov 03:13, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

How is this different from the already-operational Tatatabot? - (WT-en) Dguillaime 03:26, 19 August 2009 (EDT)
I don't think it's pretty much different but my guess is that having a backup is not a bad idea. Up-to-date interwiki links will be helpfull for all wikivoyagers ;) --(WT-en) Volkov 03:32, 19 August 2009 (EDT)
Support. Seems to be doing a good job already, and redundancy is good. Volkov, if you're up for a challenge, how about also automating Wikipedia<->Wikivoyage links? We use [[WikiPedia:XXX]] (note: case may vary), while Wikipedia usually uses the {{wikivoyage}}> template (cf Wikipedia:Template:Wikivoyage). (WT-en) Jpatokal 04:46, 19 August 2009 (EDT)
Support. A backup to Tatabot won't hurt, and it would be awesome if there was (additionally) a way to automate Wikipedia links, although that isn't a prerequisite for supporting this bot. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 10:48, 19 August 2009 (EDT)

YggdrasilBot

I'd like to create a script to add "isIn" information for as many articles as possible. We've done a lot by hand already, but I think it might make sense to do a pass automatically. I'm calling it "YggdrasilBot", since its intention is to build a Tree of the World. I think it'll be tricky, but here's how it will work:

  1. It will start with the main 7 continents as input, plus other top-level areas like Central America and the Caribbean.
  2. For each input article, it will read the article, and look for sections of the article with particular names ("Sections", "Regions", "Countries", "Other destinations", "Districts", "States", "Provinces", "Counties", etc.). This will be configurable so that we can use the same bot for different language versions.
  3. In each of those article sections, it will look for links of the form "* [[Link]]" -- that is, only links where the link is the first item in a top-level list. This is the Project:Manual of style format for listing regions, cities, etc. It will ignore second- or higher-level links in hierarchical lists, and links embedded in text.
  4. It will add the articles referenced by the links to its queue of input articles.
  5. It will note that the input article is a parent for each of the linked articles -- making a two-way relationship between the article being read and the linked articles.
  6. Once it has finished with the input, it will do some calculations on the graph it's built. For each node (destination), it will look at each parent. It will discard any parent that is an ancestor of one of its other parents. Then, it will choose the first parent out of the remaining list.
  7. After the calculations are done, for each node, it will check to see if the article for the node exists, and if node already has a parent defined (by reading the RDF data). If it exists and doesn't already have a parent, the bot will append an {{isIn|Parent}} template to the bottom of the article.

I'm going to write this over the next few days (either in Pywikipediabottish or Perl + WWW::Mediawiki::Client), and run it next week (pending approval). The code will be available here and from my arch repository.

I'm trying to be as conservative as possible with this, but I'm going to try it out on a test repository first. --(WT-en) Evan 15:37, 9 Dec 2005 (EST)

Support. As soon as it can run on even the most conservative and obvious cases please get it running. -- (WT-en) Colin 00:23, 11 Dec 2005 (EST)
Good idea = Support. A point though. While regions are able to be parts of the branches, the cities can only be the leaves on the end. The regions should have city destinations listed on them, the cities (except huge ones with districts) should not. Also, if a city has an appearance in multiple region articles then the most distant or deepest region should be chosen as the IsIn link. There should also be some consistency, with all city articles off the same region, including the existing ones, getting the same IsIn link. Thus if an IsIn link already exists on a sister page then the validity of that IsIn should be checked for consistency with all the other sister pages. This could also mean not adding an IsIn link if there are too many sister links off one page - possibly because there need to be more regions. Finally, in situations where regions are not built out, but cities are, there is the potential for the IsIn link to be misassigned too early in the tree. This could be overcome by the Bot changing the IsIn link once a region is built out or else reporting misplaced IsIn's, excessive IsIn's and missing region pages. The assumption here is that a human added IsIn is more reliable than a Bot one. -- (WT-en) Huttite 00:59, 11 Dec 2005 (EST)
First: the point of step 6 is to make sure that only the deepest region is used. Second, what about adding a lint comment to the talk page of articles that have weird conditions? That would give us the benefit of the automated tool without writing to the actual article when there's a strange case. --(WT-en) Evan 13:04, 12 Dec 2005 (EST)
Support. This is similar to User:(WT-en) Elgaard#Wikivoyage_as_book (which I hope to replace by a script that use isIn). --(WT-en) elgaard 16:35, 11 Dec 2005 (EST)
I'd support this as a maintenance tool, but would it be possible to first create a list of articles that still need isIn information, and then wait a week or two to see how many people can manually set up? At the moment it seems like isIn is doing wonders for getting people to create parent regions and more clearly decide what belongs where, so there seems to be some value in holding off for a bit longer. -- (WT-en) Ryan 16:43, 11 Dec 2005 (EST)
Support. (WT-en) Ryan has made a good point though..... Why don't we hold off on running the bot until after New Year....? (WT-en) Paul James Cowie 18:35, 11 Dec 2005 (EST)
Me too. I don't think this is terribly urgent, so let's let humans to the hard part first. (WT-en) Jpatokal 01:32, 12 Dec 2005 (EST)
Just for info sake: I just did a query and of 6164 non-redirect, non-disambiguation pages in the main namespace, 1536 have a link to the "isin" template. How about this: I'll the script ready to go and run it against a test database, and then let's wait till January to run it. I'd like to actually have it go on scheduled basis once every few days to keep the entire site well-stitched. --(WT-en) Evan 12:55, 12 Dec 2005 (EST)
I'm for the script, especially if it uses the perl library, and if you give me some feedback on its design and any bugs you find. -- (WT-en) Mark 04:58, 12 Dec 2005 (EST)
How would you handle the case of one place belonging to two regions, such as Lake Tahoe or Niagara Falls? Also some links that this bot should look at have "The" or some other short word before them. -(WT-en) phma 09:35, 21 Dec 2005 (EST)
I support the script as well. Having nearly 5000 articles to do by hand would take an awfully long time, so automation is good. Weekly sounds nice, too. -- (WT-en) Ilkirk 10:30, 30 Dec 2005 (EST)
Can the bot update a Special:Yggdrasil or a Project:Yggdrasil page with the actual tree of the world? I am thinking of a page where the world's continents, countries, regions, states and cities are shown in the form of a hierarchical tree, which can be expanded and collapsed when needed? It would be great if the article's status were also shown, so if I want to find all the stub articles under India, I could do it at one go. --(WT-en) Ravikiran 05:25, 4 Jan 2006 (EST)

AutotranslateBot

As part of the autotranslation feature I'm going to start testing a bot and adding autotranslations to subpages of article Talk pages (ie /Parigi:Discussione/Translation for an Italian version of the English article or /Talk:Cologne/Translation for a english version of the German article). I'm going to start out with half-a-dozen or so, for feedback, and then work on small batches where it would be useful. (WT-en) Majnoona 14:26, 1 July 2006 (EDT)

AntiVandalBot

WikiPedia currently runs a bot named WikiPedia:User:AntiVandalBot which uses pattern matching to revert obvious vandalism. The vandalism reversions it makes seem to be remarkably accurate and include everything from the "Bob is gay" edits to page blanking (see WikiPedia:Special:Contributions/AntiVandalBot). It also leaves a note on the user page for an author whose change was reverted, and will not revert a change twice when in "calm" mode, which is the default - there is also an "angry" mode. They have a WikiPedia:User:AntiVandalBot/requests page for getting it to run on Wikis other than Wikipedia, and I'd like to try to get it running on English Wikivoyage. Should there be any problems with the bot the failsafe is for an admin to block the user the bot runs under, so it seems like it would be safe enough. -- (WT-en) Ryan 17:43, 18 July 2006 (EDT)

  • Support. Tawkerbot2 does fine work on Wikipedia. For the few pages I have on my watchlist, it usually gets the silly vandalism first before anyone else has a chance to take a whack at it. I've reviewed takwerbot2's contribution log a few times, and it looks perfect to me. -- (WT-en) Colin 17:53, 18 July 2006 (EDT)
  • Question: WikiPedia:User:Tawkerbot2/requests mentions a cost for the software; is this an issue? - (WT-en) Todd VerBeek 19:24, 20 July 2006 (EDT)
    • If that is an issue I don't see why we can't handle vandalism manually. Of course it'd be nice not to have to worry about a cleverly hidden "I want to eat your children", "Bob is gay", or wwww.crazyfarmsexffffffffffffff.com. Aside from the aforementioned concern of cost the Tawkerbot page also says something about needing a seperate server to run off of would that be a problem? -- (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 19:32, 20 July 2006 (EDT)
    • The comment about a fee has been added recently, and it wasn't added by the script's author so it's not clear to me if it's a fee that's going to be charged, or if it was just a suggestion by someone else to start charging. If I make a request to get the bot running here and they say there's a fee then all bets are off - this is just something that would be "nice to have", it's not a necessity. As to a separate server, I think that's the script's author saying he wants a separate server to run it from, although I guess he's also looking at a P2P solution. -- (WT-en) Ryan 19:35, 20 July 2006 (EDT)
      • We can run it off the old wikivoyage.org server (it just runs the mailing lists, now... and my blog, and Maj's home page, and a couple of other miscellaneous sites); I'm not sure how I feel about any additional fees for use, but I can ask IB about it. --(WT-en) Evan 19:46, 20 July 2006 (EDT)
  • Support, provided everything pans out. -- (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 19:43, 20 July 2006 (EDT)
  • A couple notes on the fee thing, mostly that was mentioned as we were in a major server crunch at the time and neither of us could afford the $150 or so a month a server capable of running it on all the wikis. In short the script right now can be grabbed from an svn, do you have an IRC recent changes feed, that's the one other major thing that it needs. -- 207.216.238.134 12:23, 21 July 2006 (EDT)
    • A feed can be set up if needed, just let us know any next steps by leaving a comment on my talk page or on User talk:(WT-en) Evan#Tawkerbot. -- (WT-en) Ryan 16:02, 21 July 2006 (EDT)
      • I gotta say, though: these notices are generated in MediaWiki, then sent to an IRC server, and read by a bot, then sent through a Web interface back to the MediaWiki server... it sure seems like the long way around the block! --(WT-en) Evan 16:10, 21 July 2006 (EDT)
        • So should we just do manual reverts or click the rollback button instead? - (WT-en) Andrew
          • No, I'm just wondering if we could short-circuit the process by taking the pipe where warnings come out and twist it around so it fits into the hole where reverts go in. --(WT-en) Evan 17:08, 21 July 2006 (EDT)
            • Update: the bot has been renamed and as of 24 October 2006 is running on a new machine, so with any luck we might see some action on this one soon. -- (WT-en) Ryan 03:09, 2 November 2006 (EST)

SpamFilterBot 2.0

So Evan and I were discussing various ideas about Wikivoyage and I think it would be great if we could get a bot up and running which updates the spam filter across all language versions, Shared, and review and keeps all of the spam filters consistent so to prevent EN spammers from spamming ES, IT, etc. Who ever writes the script gets a barnstar. On the count of three... 1... 2... GO! -- (WT-en) Andrew Haggard (Sapphire) 23:25, 6 August 2006 (EDT)

Would it be easier to just have a single spam filter on shared? -- (WT-en) Ryan 22:11, 15 August 2006 (EDT)
For both this & the anti-vandal bot above, are there WMF multi-site bots we could use? Using code that is already tested and that we do not have to maintain sounds like an enormous win to me. Pashley (talk) 18:24, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Dotmodroid

As updating DotMs/OtBPs by hand is annoying (update front page, place into index, remove from current discussion, slot into archive), I'd like to build a bot along the lines of (WT-en) DiscoverBot to automate the process. (Wikipedia might have something snarfable.) Ideally, it could maintain all Wikivoyage language versions that have active DoTM processes, and it would be smart enough to do nothing if the queue is empty. (WT-en) Jpatokal 02:14, 1 November 2006 (EST)

  • Support. Dotmodroid is a good name, but when will we see the JaniBot? -- (WT-en) Ryan 02:44, 1 November 2006 (EST)
What would JaniBot do? Travel the world, apply for Indian visas for people, speak eight languages semi-decently and write new scripts for more bots? -- (WT-en) Andrew H. (Sapphire) 03:05, 6 November 2006 (EST)
"Would"? Ha! The useless bloated sac of protoplasm known as User:Jpatokal was long since terminated and replaced by JaniBot. Prepare to be assimilated. -- (WT-en) JaniBot 03:08, 6 November 2006 (EST)
 :) -- (WT-en) Andrew H. (Sapphire) 03:14, 6 November 2006 (EST)
This came to mind after reading this. -- (WT-en) Andrew H. (Sapphire) 04:19, 25 November 2006 (EST)
  • Support. Sounds like a good way to deal with a tedious task. --(WT-en) Evan 10:43, 2 November 2006 (EST)
  • Support. Have I made life easier or tougher for the bot by modifying the format of the DotM candidates page? I am guessing easier, as it can just snarf the stuff between the div tags, but you never know with bots... — (WT-en) Ravikiran 21:23, 13 November 2006 (EST)

CommaBot

I noted this morning that someone had started Newark, New Jersey when we already had a Newark (New Jersey). I wonder if it would be useful to have a bot that added redirects for US and Canadian towns where a comma-separated city-and-state is a common naming convention. I'd probably just use the US and Canadian cities from the UN/LOCODE list, which would leave out the dots-on-the-map, but would cover most of the countries. It would make redirects of the form City, State and City, ST to City (State) or just City (depending on if the article exists). --(WT-en) Evan 14:22, 22 November 2006 (EST)

When the article already exists as "City", how do you plan to ensure that it is the right city? Walk the isIn tree until you get to a state? Check for a Wikipedia link? (I mention this half as clarification, and half as "I may want to do something similar") Do you plan on making these redirects only for existing articles? -- (WT-en) Colin 15:29, 22 November 2006 (EST)

MapmakerBot

I'm very close to being able to fully automate the process of turning a Wikivoyage article combined with OSM data into a mostly-usable map. I would like to propose creating a bot account on shared for uploading the results of this process. When complete the MapmakerBot would do this:

  1. Watch pages in a given category, like say "Has Map"
  2. When anything changes on one of those pages, regenerate the map from configuration found in the map image on the page and OSM data
  3. Upload the SVG result of that map generation to shared
  4. Wait for someone to tweak the SVG file uploaded
  5. Retrieve the SVG
  6. Convert it into a properly-sized PNG
  7. Upload the PNG

To see examples of the sort of configuration the map generation requires have a look the Paris articles. At some point I'll write up some documentation on how to use the thing. -- (WT-en) Mark 11:42, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

Support. -- (WT-en) Colin 16:15, 21 May 2009 (EDT)
Support --(WT-en) Stefan (sertmann) Talk 16:19, 21 May 2009 (EDT)
Support. (WT-en) Jpatokal 05:43, 22 May 2009 (EDT)
Just in case you're curious, I've pushed the source code to http://gitorious.org/osmatravel -- (WT-en) Mark 11:11, 22 May 2009 (EDT)
I've created the account on shared. I don't remember, is there a process to request the bot bit be flipped? -- (WT-en) Mark 11:22, 22 May 2009 (EDT)

What is the current status of this one? Does anything need to change since we no longer have shared? Pashley (talk) 21:52, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

weTravelWrite.com

iTravelWrite is an iPhone app (currently available, and free, in the App Store) intended to make it easy for people to update Wikivoyage from their phones - with GPS location information, in particular. This will add to the lat/long data available on Wikivoyage, making mapping much easier, and will hopefully increase accuracy too, by allowing people to make edits while literally on the spot.

The app is built to funnel updates through a central service, a Python script running on Google App Engine, at www.wetravelwrite.com. This reduces the bandwidth cost for the phone app considerably, provides a central point of logging and control, and lets users jot down quick notes that they can later expand into edits when they're at a real computer. To be clear, this is a script, but not a bot: it only acts in response to specific user requests from the iPhone app.

I plunged forward and built the app and service without previously asking for an OK here - sorry about that! I've disabled edits from the app for the moment, until (/if) the the script is approved, and also until I fix a bug in how it handles non-ASCII characters. (Which in turn is an example of why a central point of control is useful.)

(WT-en) Rezendi 15:18, 25 August 2009 (EDT)

  • As an aside, I've noticed that some coordinates that have been added so far are enormously incorrect - for example, this edit to Brisbane actually has coordinates for Ohio . I don't think we can deal with errors like that automatically, and it would be easy for more to slip past... does the app default to adding current coordinates? If so, should it? - (WT-en) Dguillaime 15:54, 25 August 2009 (EDT)
    • The app has an "I'm There!" button that plugs in the current coordinates (or at least what the phone believes to be the current coordinates); people can also use it to enter lat/long coordinates by hand, if they are truly hardcore. (WT-en) Rezendi 21:10, 29 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Support. Can someone provide a test server for Rezendi to debug his app against? If no test server is available, I support testing it here. -- (WT-en) Colin 17:25, 25 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Oppose - for now. There has to be some way of turning it off, and giving the user a message from WT. Having to block IP addresses if it malfunctions is unacceptable, and may even be impractical if it is installed widely. If wikivoyage API changes, or we change sections, or definitions, there has to be someway of telling people that they need to update, and to prevent them from making changes that will damage the system without having to block them entirely. I would suggest that the program use a particular user account, or the existance of a page to refuse to update, and delivery a user message. Possiblly this file could be based on the installed versioh. --(WT-en) inas 17:39, 25 August 2009 (EDT)
Actually, I don't think iTravelWrite is a script at all. In effect, it's a very specialist browser not too different from (say) a Firefox mod, operated by real live humans, and technically it doesn't need our permission.
That said, I do see the potential for damage here, and I applaud User:Rezendi for letting us know about this. Careful testing is necessary, and there should be simple safeguards built in, eg. not changing any existing coordinates and a check at startup to see if the program is allowed to run. (WT-en) Jpatokal 23:48, 25 August 2009 (EDT)
Don't worry - while the iPhone app can be widely distributed, it was deliberately designed so that doesn't connect to Wikivoyage directly; instead, it connects to the Web server at weTravelWrite.com, and hence all edits from the iTravelWrite app go through there. Meaning that there is a single point of control at which edits from the app can be turned off from everyone. (As is the case at the moment, until I fix the special-character bug, which will hopefully be very soon after my paid work becomes less time-intensive than it is at the moment.)
I'm happy to set it up so that all edits use an "iTravelWrite" user account, or, alternately, to poll a page on Wikivoyage to see if edits are OK (although the first solution seems more elegant.) (WT-en) Rezendi 17:22, 26 August 2009 (EDT)
Agreed — the first option is better. (WT-en) Gorilla Jones 18:45, 26 August 2009 (EDT)
I'd like to add that I think the overall idea is great. We need more original research from travellers in WT to progress, and giving more people the ability to do updates on the road is great. However, I also see an essential part of a wiki being able to attempt communication between editors, and to have some identification that a group of edits were done by the same person. Its part of the collaborative approach. It's why talk pages exist. It's why we try to insist every message is signed. It is why the IP or account is logged on every edit. If everything is coming from one IP, and the users are anonymous, then we don't really have any reverse path to communicate with the user about their edit. We can't point them at the mos, to correct a mistake they are making. If someone is a vandal, we have no granularity of control. Has this sort of thing done for other wiki's, that we can see how they manage these issues. Has anyone written a iphone WP editing application? Would it be too hard for the application to allow users to create accounts on WT? --(WT-en) inas 22:12, 26 August 2009 (EDT)
I do see your point. Lumping all edits together under the same user would limit accountability and communication. It is possible to have users enter their Wikivoyage usernames and passwords into the app, and forward them onwards, although there might be security concerns, as the passwords would be in plaintext. (Although, um, now that I look at it, it seems the main Wikivoyage login page uses http not https, so it wouldn't be any less secure than the status quo.) You would then be able to distinguish edits from the app via a) the edit summary comments, which will always include "weTravelWrite"; b) the user-agent, I think; c) the IP number (though c) is less reliable as it depends on Google App Engine.)
I could also log the iPhones' unique device IDs, and pass them in as part of the edit summary, which might be helpful in terms of identifying edits from a specific user. I could even pass on the IP addresses they're using ... but really, that wouldn't help - they'll change frequently, both over time and as users move from network to network to Wi-Fi site. Ultimately, as people move to using their smartphones, IP numbers are just going to be less and less meaningful; it's a problem many sites are going to have to deal with.
Would that be OK? If the app requests a Wikivoyage login from its users, so you can identify them individually, and if I pass in the iPhone's unique device ID regardless? Then you should be able to distinguish iTravelWrite edits from other edits, and also group edits by unique phone IDs, even if they don't choose to log in. It won't be as convenient as it has been via IP numbers, but, well, that's the mobile Web for you. (WT-en) Rezendi 13:22, 29 August 2009 (EDT)
Also, it seems that I have fixed the non-ASCII-characters bug (though I won't be completely certain until I can test against real data) so I'm ready to proceed as and when you guys are. (WT-en) Rezendi 21:07, 29 August 2009 (EDT)
I like the idea of each user using their own Wikivoyage account. They can be fully fledged community members then. Is there something we can do to make it easier using OpenID? I mean, could you run a server on your site, that way you could sort of insert their ID seamlessly, and then use it as their wikivoyage id? I'm not trying to make things more complicated, just thinking out loud. If it all sounds to hard, I'm happy with the users creating a real wikivoyage account. --(WT-en) inas 22:20, 30 August 2009 (EDT)
Hmm. That's an interesting notion. App Engine uses Google Accounts, so once users authorize themselves on my server, I think I can then seamlessly log them into Wikivoyage using OpenID. The problem is the authorization between their phones and my server -- I'm not comfortable with transmitting Gmail/Google Account passwords in plaintext, and https is hard to do (and slow) on an iPhone. Tell you what: I'll let them use their existing Wikivoyage username and password, if any, and I'll look into doing a Google Account / OpenID login if that's available and a Wikivoyage ID isn't provided. (No guarantees until I've analyzed the problem in detail, though...) (WT-en) Rezendi 16:58, 31 August 2009 (EDT)

Update: I have submitted a new version of the iTravelWrite app that fixes bugs and lets users enter their Wikivoyage username and password, and won't allow edits unless they either do that or provide an email address (which will be added to the edit comments.) Once it's accepted, I'll withdraw the old version of the app and turn editing back on. (WT-en) Rezendi 15:23, 8 September 2009 (EDT)

isInKat: (not done, existing bot used instead)

The question of whether to use categories in parallel with breadcrumbs is open at Template talk:IsPartOf#Category of IsPartOf and Wikivoyage talk:Breadcrumb navigation#Navigating down a breadcrumb trail but, if every region above city/town needed to have a corresponding geographic category, that would require a 'bot script to create the categories and place each in its parent region. The list of currently-used isPartOf tags is thousands of articles long, removing the local-level (city/town) destination articles would still leave a few thousand categories for creation. A pywikipediabot script would be capable of this, if it were fed the new pages from a programme with the list on a local database.

Categories would make some tasks easier - such as locating articles with no parent region at all (which should become uncategorised pages). The megabyte-long list (User:K7L/isPartOf) of existing tags was obtained by downloading the XML database dump and searching for "isIn"/"IsIn"/"isPartOf". Each record has pagename and parent name, extracted from one page. I propose to import this to a database table locally, extract a list of all unique parent locations, then generate category descriptions for these places (category:someregion - [Someregion] is in [parentregion]. [category:parentregion]). These would then be fed to 'pagefromfile.py' (included in the pywikipediabot package) to post the generated category description pages.

There just seem to be too many of these (with the task too repetitive) to generate them manually; this needs to be automated. K7L (talk) 15:59, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Having this generated automatically would save any misunderstandings you users attempting to create manually. The structure is very helpful for sorting out article that are placed in the wrong ispartof. Please create categories with the format used in {{IsPartOf/preload}}. --Traveler100 (talk) 10:37, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I think this one is dubious.
    • First, this section starts with "The question of whether to use categories in parallel with breadcrumbs is open at ..." As I see it, the question is open, not settled, and we should not add hundreds of categories until/unless we have a consensus that we need them.
    • Second, I do not yet know enough about User:K7L to want to trust him/her with bot powers. Most of the bots proposed here are tested imports from other WMF wikis. This would be a new one specific to WV.
    • That said, I heartily agree that if we add such categories, it must be done by a bot. User:Atsirlin is quite correct that "Manual creation of categories is going to be a disaster". Pashley (talk) 14:04, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • K7L, could you respond to the concern raised in the second point? My reading of existing discussions is that there is support for creating these (hidden) categories, but before flipping the bot flag it would be good to address Pashley's concerns. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:56, 17 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • One way to sidestep concerns about a "new" bot flag would be to support #Creation of categories (the same task, but using an existing Anomebot) so that there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Easiest solution. In general, en.WP deals with these by allowing the new bot to run a short block of edits as a test (typically no more than fifty pages). If those look good, then approval is given to run the rest of the batch under the 'bot' flag. K7L (talk) 16:48, 17 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. As I read it there is consensus to create a geographic category structure, although some disagreement over whether or not it should be hidden by default. Having tried to create a few categories myself the manual process is error prone, so having a bot do this is the right way to go. -- Ryan • (talk) • 17:12, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

PoI File

This is more a testing-the-water at the moment and comes from a question I asked in the Travellers' Pub. Given many articles are starting to get latitude and longitude tags in listings, and given the popularity of GPS (not just SatNav devices but many mobile phones are starting to have GPS built in) would there be any use in creating a script that can scour a page for listings containing lat/long tags and creating a PoI file for that page?

I would propose to use the GPX Standard since it seems to be the best attempt at a common format (and I know Garmin MapSource will open these files). Just then a case of how to present it to the reader - do we have a /PoI page for each article that shows the raw XML of the GPX file that the reader then has to copy and paste into a text file (not my prefered way) or is there perhaps some way to generate a file that can be downloaded straight away as a GPX file.

Anyway, if people think it would be of use and would fit in with policy (I suspect it should since it's generally speaking a read-only script where the article pages are concerned) and also can point me to some useful articles or examples on how to create scripts for MediaWiki I would be interested in giving this a go. (WT-en) Nrms 03:07, 8 March 2010 (EST)

If we use a template for coordinates that emits a geo microformat, as proposed at Template talk:Listing#Coordinates (and as done on Wikipedia by Template:Coord) we can then use a one-per-page template like en.Wikipedia's Template:GeoGroup to make them available as a downloadable KML file, as used, for instance, by Google maps (and by conversion, as a GPX file) in real-time. I could add the necessary code in about 10 minutes, and as only HTML classes are involved, there'd be no processor overhead. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:57, 25 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Only a fraction of our listings are currently templatised and very few currently have co-ordinates. That will need to change if we are ever to generate locator maps or links to auto-generate same. Using the toolserver script would require that script change to accept voy: links instead of only wikipedia: pages. If a listing had the tags or templates (so that address, name and other portions can be automatically extracted) it might be possible for a 'bot to obtain (lat, long) from an external source and insert it into the article. In some cases, though, we don't even have that... the listings are plaintext. A locator map would be invaluable but there's a lot to be done before we can do these for all pages. K7L (talk) 16:26, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Snowbot

I'd like to run Snowbot on here to replace old reference to shared with local pages where applicable, convert links from external to interwikis, etc, automatically to help with the migration process and cut down on those red links. I have run bots on enwiki and other wikis (including adminbots) many times without many issues. Snowolf How can I help? 01:37, 12 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thehelpfulbot

From the user page, User:Thehelpfulbot seems to be a bot, and since it is updating country flags I've tagged it as such. Listing it here per policy. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:22, 12 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Anomebot2

Swept in from the the pub: K7L (talk) 21:33, 25 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Gocoding bot Hi! I'm a member of the geographic coordinates project on the English-language Wikipedia. I operate w:en:User:The Anomebot2, a bot that adds and maintains geocodes on that project. You can see some of its recent work here.

I've extracted a list of articles on en: Wikivoyage that currently do not have a Geo template, but for which coordinates are available on the corresponding article on enwiki. I've done quite a lot of dataset cleaning, and I have a list of 2317 6687 articles currently without geodata templates for which I have coordinates from enwiki. If someone would like to give User:The Anomebot2 bot rights here, I'd be happy to add them to these articles. -- The Anome (talk) 21:21, 25 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

  • Odd that no one's commented on this... current status quo is that co-ordinates are displayed for cities/towns if we have them (although the lat= and long= fields in individual listings currently do nothing). As such, this looks like it would be useful. K7L (talk) 20:16, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Flagged --Peter Talk 00:35, 29 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks. I'll create a tweaked version of the bot back-end designed to handle Wikivoyage's article format, then start to make edits later this week. -- The Anome (talk) 19:13, 2 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Update: I've now added coordinates to 10995 11000+ articles, which is as many as I could do automatically for the time being without getting into unreasonable amounts of programming work writing more pattern-matching code. -- The Anome (talk) 22:40, 7 December 2012 (UTC) -- updated 2012-12-09[reply]

Following my recent addition of 11000+ coordinates sourced from equivalent articles on enwiki and/or GNIS, I noticed that there are still lots of articles here that could be interwiki linked to Wikipedia, but aren't. I can auto-generate a lot of these, with high accuracy, on the following basis:

For locations outside the U.S.:

  • contains isPartOf or isIn template on Wikivoyage
  • same basename on both Wikivoyage and enwiki
  • one and only one article on enwikivoyage with that basename (i.e. after stripping of disambiguation suffixes, and, in the case of Wikivoyage, also slash-prefixes)
  • same for enwiki, for the same basename
  • the single country location identified by tree traversal of the Wikivoyage breadcrumbs graph agrees with country identified by tree traversal of the Wikipedia category graph
  • NGA GNS data indicates that there is one, and only one, place of that name in that country

I can also generate links for U.S. articles using by-state-and-county disambiguation (using GNIS data) for article names of the format of Wikivoyage "Placename (State)" <-> Wikipedia "Placename, State". (or just Wikipedia "Placename", using the same rules as for non-U.S. locations, but using GNIS data instead of GNS.)

Once that's done, I can trivially add the resulting interwiki links to the articles here. My best guess is that this will generate at least several thousand new interwiki links. These will, in turn, act as a data source later creation of backlinks from enwiki to Wikivoyage, copying of coordinates (where appropriate) from enwiki to Wikivoyage, and finally eventually integration of all of these with Wikidata, OpenStreetMap etc.

If my bot can be authorized to do make these changes, I can put this on my queue of things to do in the next week or so. -- The Anome (talk) 14:00, 9 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good to me. Pashley (talk) 14:48, 9 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
My support too. --Globe-trotter (talk) 14:53, 9 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. The ability and willingness of Wikipedia users like yourself to help out with scripting these sort of tasks is hugely appreciated and extremely useful - I find it extraordinarily impressive how much work is done behind the scenes when I view Special:RecentChanges with the "show bots" flag enabled. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:47, 9 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: If you do ever use this to generate backlinks to Wikivoyage from the 'external links' on Wikipedia, could you please ensure that anything labelled "stub" or "outline" here does not get a backlink? Most of these are "X is in Y", followed by an empty template, and are utterly worthless. (No idea why we keep them.) K7L (talk) 15:57, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I'm on the job -- as before, it may take several days to a week for me to do this. -- The Anome (talk) 18:44, 9 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Update: I've now generated 4000+ potential interwiki links for non-U,S. locations. About half of these have interwiki tags already, so expect a gain of about 2000 interwiki tags after this pass has finished. Then I will do U.S. locations. -- The Anome (talk) 15:03, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
OK, that's it for now. the total to date is 11170 coordinates added, and 2150 interwiki tags. If you can think of any other ways I could help, please drop me a line at my enwiki talk page. -- The Anome (talk) 19:26, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I've got another couple

I've been poking around to find small annoyances, and seeing if any of them can be easily fixed using a bot. Here's another one.

547 pages currently have IsPartOf tags that point to pages that have been renamed. An example is Córdoba_(city,_Argentina) which is currently marked as IsPartOf Cordoba (province, Argentina), but should be marked up as IsPartOf Córdoba (province, Argentina) instead. Similarly with [Polesie]], marked as IsPartOf Lublin_Voivodship instead of the correct Lubelskie.

As a result, the breadcrumbs in these articles don't work correctly. I can fix the lot using a script to update all the broken tags to point to the correct redirect targets, if you approve.

Another thing I can do is track down the last remaining IsIn tags, and fix them, too. -- The Anome (talk) 02:18, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Fixing broken breadcrumbs has been on a lot of people's TODO lists and has never gotten done, so if you can fix it that would be awesome! -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:25, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
How does this work? Does it find "isIn" or "isPartOf" tags pointing to a redirect with no breadcrumbs? I'm just wondering if the kludge Russia (Asia) (a redirect which contains #REDIRECT [[Russia]] {{isPartOf|Asia}} will be left alone (the redirect is a trick to allow Siberia "isIn" Russia (Asia) so that it gets Asia breadcrumbs instead of Europe. K7L (talk) 03:01, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It simply looks for IsPartOf tags that point to a redirect page, and uses that substitution, without looking to see if the redirect target itself has a tag. It won't necessarily make things right, but it should usually make them better, and never make them worse. I could add the check, but I can't see the point: simple heuristics which get things 95% right, and don't make anything worse, are generally preferable to more complex heuristics which are harder to debug. I don't currently try to follow multiple redirect chains: although I easily could -- it's a one-liner, and I can't see how it could be harmful.
I would leave the Russia (Asia) kludge alone, as it points to a page fragment, not a page: it does, however, expose an edge case for the whole breadcrumbs system: the assumption that the graph of inclusion of territories and geographic boundaries forms a tree, as opposed to a more general graph, which isn't easily fixed, except programatically as part of a rewrite of the breadcrumbs support code.
Fixing IsIn is even simpler: I will just grep them all out of the dump, and unescape their target string at the same time as changing IsIn to IsPartOf. Again, I won't do any over-elaborate checks while doing this, such as checks that the target exists, or has a tag, since it wouldn't actually make anything any better: experience has shown me that it's better to break things into a set of simple, dumb, do-no-harm tasks, than to try to resolve everything in one pass.
By the way, can I have rollbacker rights for this parent account, please? It would make bot debugging that much easier. -- The Anome (talk) 13:57, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Could you also change all IsIn references to IsPartOf? --Globe-trotter (talk) 21:40, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes: I mention it above. -- The Anome (talk) 22:30, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think we have the rollbacker right enabled on this wiki. –sumone10154(talk) 18:51, 12 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I've now replaced all 6300-or-so instances of IsIn in pages in the main and File: namespaces with the appropriate IsPartOf tags. Uses in meta pages remain untouched. Yes Done

And also fixed nearly all of the instances of IsPartOf pointing to redirect pages. There are probably a few edge cases remaining: I've been cautious in doing these. Yes Done -- The Anome (talk) 14:25, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

DMOZ

I'm working on generating a new set of DMOZ links, as the existing links here seemed to be in rather poor repair: are people here OK with me doing this? -- The Anome (talk) 19:28, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sumone's bot (below) previously attempted to fix some of them up by removing the incorrect "Region" prefix. What is your bot doing? And assuming it's nothing insane I'm completely fine with it - you've done great work thus far. -- Ryan • (talk) • 19:43, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Scanning the DMOZ, Wikivoyage and Wikipedia and GNS category trees, and generating links for everything that I can find that is unambiguous. The matching logic is really quite simple (traverse all root-to-leaf arcs in all three trees, checking for each top-to-bottom paths for same name, up to disambiguation, same country, and only one of them in that country in all three sources) and I've got all the necessary datasets and tools in place already. It may well be that Sumone has found and/or fixed all of these already, in which case this will just validate their work and provide a cross-check. If not, I will at least be able to add a few more links, or generate a list of discrepancies between my links and Sumone's, or both. -- The Anome (talk) 20:02, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds good to me... unleash the bot. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:24, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
It looks like in some cases the bot may be adding duplicate Dmoz tags: . -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:55, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I found (and, hopefully, correctly fixed) that bug about ten minutes ago: I've made a list of the 250-or-so articles processed before that point, and I'll do another pass on just those articles to remove the duplicates: my best guess is that there are about 20 or so such articles for it to track down and fix. -- The Anome (talk) 22:07, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Update: it looks like there are about 4000 new DMOZ tags on their way: I won't know the exact number until the bot finishes making the edits, since the last phase of the process peeks at the live copy while editing it, and performs final checks. -- The Anome (talk) 01:21, 15 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The bot has now added DMOZ links to 5175 articles. Yes Done -- The Anome (talk) 00:36, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Fantastic. --Globe-trotter (talk) 01:09, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, that is awesome. Thank you! -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:58, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are lots of bogus interwiki links between different Wikivoyage languages, such as for example a link to fi:Rio Grande do Sul from Rio Grande do Sul. There are also large blocks of commented-out and usually completely invalid interwiki links in many articles, presumably once added as part of a templating process, that seem not to serve any purpose any more other than to generate confusion. I'd be happy to work my way through the articles removing both of these. -- The Anome (talk) 21:32, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Support from me with one question - if Finnish Wikivoyage re-launches, is there any way to rebuild interwiki links? How do other WMF projects manage this when a new language version launches? -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:37, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I would wait, since we expect most of the language versions to relaunch. The commented-out potential interwiki links were a bad idea, though, and should be removed. --Peter Talk 22:07, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
OK. I can easily remove just the commented-out interwiki links from the ~1500 articles containing them, while leaving the other interlanguage links in, regardless of validity (except for those linking to obviously impossible targets such as the empty string or FULLPAGENAME). I will do this in the next day or so. -- The Anome (talk) 11:52, 18 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yes Done -- The Anome (talk) 23:30, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

wts: category links serve no purpose any more, and are just clutter now: they're not even useful for finding potential commons links (something which can be achieved better algorithmically) so I see no reason to keep the wts links. I can remove the lot of them very simply, given the OK here: they're currently in ~1400 articles. -- The Anome (talk) 23:33, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:01, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • On other Wikivoyages I used the wts: links to find the right category on Commons, and worked in most cases very well. So the statement that it is just clutter is something I do not agree with. And only 1400 pages is not that much. I would prefer that someone would add Commons links to the articles first, before the suggested way of adding Commons links algorithmically does make the wts links not needed any more. I have experience with adding Commons links and based on that I really want to see first the method of adding those links. Romaine (talk) 02:10, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd think that one would have a better chance of finding potential commons: links by following the wikipedia: link than by trying to match wts: ? K7L (talk) 04:02, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's right. Following earlier bot runs, most articles now have links to the en: Wikipedia. Using data taken from dumps, I can now cross-reference these links with links to Commons categories from the corresponding Wikipedia articles, to create links to Commons categories to add here. -- The Anome (talk) 10:13, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • OK, I'm halfway through that process now, and working on cleaning and validating the data. I currently have 6300+ commons category link candidates, which I hope should more than make up for the loss of the wts: links. More soon. -- The Anome (talk) 13:55, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • I'm currently adding commons: links: I will leave the wts: links in for now, until consensus is reached here about what to do with them. -- The Anome (talk) 22:23, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • I'll reiterate my support for removing the "wts" links - they aren't a reliable way to generate commons: links, and if your bot has already generated commons: links then they most definitely just clutter now. -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:27, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • I've now added links to Wikimedia Commons to 5400+ Wikivoyage articles. Yes Done

            I propose that I now set the bot to remove the redundant wts: links from all the articles now containing links to Commons. I can then do an survey of those wts: links that remain in other articles, to see whether they have any useful information content. -- The Anome (talk) 19:15, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

        • Blow them back to Allah or the deity of your choice, they're useless now. K7L (talk) 19:32, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I've removed the wts: links from pages that now have commons: links. After this, only ~700 pages are left with wts: links in them-- The Anome (talk) 20:43, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I've now removed wts: links that are exactly match the page title, and thus have no extra information content that is not already present in the article title. After this, only ~170 wts: links remain. -- The Anome (talk) 21:12, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I've now replaced the remaining 170+ wts: links with uses of the {{wts}} template, which has no visible effect, apart from transcluding the article into a hidden category Category:Pages with old wts links. I thinks this probably sorts things for now as far as wts: links are concerned. Yes Done

Coming next: a more thorough matching of wv: articles to commons and Wikipedia entries. But probably not for a week or so. -- The Anome (talk) 21:54, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Creation of categories

I'm happy to go over the entire breadcrumb tree (which I have already parsed) to generate all the needed categories. I will initially call them all "Places in <X>". The {{IsPartOf}} template can then be alterned to automatically include articles in their respective categories. This will greatly reduce the number of pages to be edited, as otherwise I'd have to edit every single guide content page.

Can I assume this is OK? Regarding policy, we seem to already have consensus, and qualified permission, elsewhere on this page (see the K7Lbot discussion below) that this is a good idea. I can have this done quite quickly, given the go-ahead. -- The Anome (talk) 21:01, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note the discussions below at User:K7Lbot. There is already a tested format for categories, naming and content and the syntax of the ispartof template. Tested and works, just need to generate the mass of categories. --Traveler100 (talk) 21:44, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Using an existing 'bot for this would avoid the need to create a new one. I have a list of categories (from a database dump) on user:K7L/isPartOf but these will need to be cut down to remove any leaf nodes (a destination with nothing else under it doesn't need an eponymous category). I'd suggest the output be worded not as "X is in Y" but {{some template|X|Y}} so that every page can be changed in format just by editing some template. K7L (talk) 21:49, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm working my way through the breadcrumbs contained in the dump, checking for consistency and sanity before getting ready to start creating some categories. It looks like roughly 3000 will be needed. -- The Anome (talk) 11:28, 17 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
OK, doing them now. See Category:Val di Chiana for an example. -- The Anome (talk) 21:49, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As it is not creating the categories top down (which I guess would be very difficult to program) I suggest once complete a minor edit to {{RegionCat}} to resave the categories and get the content updated. Or is there a better method? --Traveler100 (talk) 21:56, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I've just added empty HTML comments to both {{IsPartOf}} and {{RegionCat}}. This should cause effectively all of the articles to be re-rendered and all the categories populated, right down to the article level. The downside is that finishing this batch of re-renders will take the site many hours to complete, but we have plenty of time -- tomorrow is soon enough to see the results. -- The Anome (talk) 23:33, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Initial look through, looks good. Nice job.--Traveler100 (talk) 06:07, 20 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This is already identifying many outlines for individual destinations which were placed "isPartOf" a province/state/country instead of in a more precise subregion. Most have very little actual content. is still reporting a thousand jobs in the job queue, so that should keep the server busy for a while. K7L (talk) 08:18, 20 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely. The output is only as good as the input. Fortunately, changing the {{IsPartOf}} entries for those articles should also change the category that they belong to, and, for those with the relevant geographical knowledge, the category tree now provides a quick way of finding article with this problem. -- The Anome (talk) 06:41, 21 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Creation of categories now complete. Yes Done -- The Anome (talk) 12:11, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Awesome, thank you. This looks like it will be extremely useful for keeping the article hierarchy organized. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:56, 23 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Districts

Your bot has been adding many IsPartOf tags in District articles like Shanghai/Bund, One example . These should not be needed. See Wikivoyage_talk:Breadcrumb_navigation#Districts and Wikivoyage_talk:Breadcrumb_navigation#Districts_2.

Is this a deliberate work-around for the parsing bug? If not, then adding tags that would not be needed if the bug were fixed and that hide the buggy behaviour in the meanwhile is not a good idea. Pashley (talk) 17:05, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

At the rate code is being updated, it looks like bugs for which patches were written in December (like putting rel="nofollow" on WT links or redirecting tag output via the {{listing}} template) are still awaiting deployment and should go live in the next update (likely Feb 11 or so) of the actual site. The isPartOf/district bug had been reported but no fix has yet been proposed, so there's likely no realistic prospect of getting a patch through code review in time for the next update. Certainly a proper bugfix is needed in the long run, but that doesn't help us right now. K7L (talk) 17:31, 27 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Another thing to look at?

Most city or region articles should have a link right after the name. For example:

  • Xiamen (厦门; Xiàmén) is a coastal city in Fujian Province in China.

The link should point to the local tourist board or local government.

I do not think a bot can fix these when they are either absent or pointing to the wrong thing. However, it should be straightforward to generate a list of articles without such links. Phrasebooks, travel topics, intineraries, talk pages and user pages can be ignored. Pashley (talk) 02:08, 7 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have been working for the last week to add interwiki links to Wikipedia articles, to test out the scope of the problem. As a result, I'm convinced that there are thousands of articles which could be linked, but are not. Linking these articles would help collaboration between Wikivoyage and other projects, as well as helping drive traffic from Wikipedia via adding links there to Wikivoyage articles which are sufficiently advanced to be useful.

Although I have linked a substantial number of articles, there are way too many articles like this for one person to finish linking within any reasonable time. However, I believe that this task can be handled quite easily by crowdsourcing the task.

Accordingly, I have put together an experimental tracking scheme for these articles, with the intention of helping this process. It uses Template:No Wikipedia link, which generates links to the hidden category Category:Articles without Wikipedia links. The template also takes an optional argument which may eventually be used to add articles to per-country subcategories of this maintenance category if needed. As an experiment, I've added this template to Brouage and Tierra del Fuego National Park.

I would now like to use my bot to add this template to several thousand articles, to start off the process. -- The Anome (talk) 21:11, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support from me. This type of approach worked nicely when we were migrating images from wts, so there's a precedent for using bots to tag articles for editorial purposes. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:14, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Update 1: see Wikipedia:Template:Coord missing for another example of using a bot-generated template and hidden categories to crowdsource manual effort to deal with a similar task. -- The Anome (talk) 21:18, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Update 2: I've now scanned the most recent dump, and there appear to be over 6000 articles that are candidates for interwiki links to Wikipedia, but do not yet have them. That is both (a) quite a daunting backlog, and (b) a serious long-term opportunity to increase Wikivoyage's traffic visibility -- The Anome (talk) 23:46, 2 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi -- is anyone here able to give me a second endorsement for this, so I can go ahead with the edits? Thanks, -- The Anome (talk) 20:06, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support. In your opinion have we exhausted all opportunities for automation here? Have we done the interwiki thing to death (links to language versions linking to wikipedia language versions, linking to en.wp?) I'm not convinced that this is of a scale we can actually practically work with. --Inas (talk) 20:15, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Not completely exhausted, no, but I've already handled most of the really low-hanging fruit via automated matching. Doing this will have two advantages: firstly, it will help coordinate the process of manual matching, (which experience suggests can be much more effective than you might think, as some people love to have tasklists they can work their way through -- for example, I worked my way through around 500 such articles in a month, almost one-tenth of the whole job), and secondly, it will hopefully let me see patterns in what remains, and in the patterns of matches being done by people, to provide inspiration for more fine-grained automatic matching processes. Experience from en: Wikipedia shows that this combination of multiple human and manual approaches is highly effective: the Wikipedia:WP:COORD project has worked its way through hundreds of thousands of articles to date in this way. -- The Anome (talk) 20:26, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      More than happy for you to be right, of course. Let's see how we go. --Inas (talk) 20:28, 4 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Links to Wikipedia articles are very needed, especially to prepare the ground for Wikidata, and also to one day benefit from the latitude/longitude info from Wikipedia. Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:18, 8 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is this template still going to be used for something, or can we get rid of it? Texugo (talk) 18:07, 10 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support, in principle at least. Where will the bot place the template in the article? Will it be in the position where the WP link would be placed, so that anyone who goes to add the WP link will see the template? Also, can a comment be added beside the template, saying "If you add a link to the Wikipedia article for this destination, please delete this template"? Nurg (talk) 07:35, 11 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to run a bot using w:wp:AWB for various find-and-replace cleanup (such as fixing dmoz links). I have been using AWB on my regular account (in semi-automatic mode), but I would like to run it on automatic mode on a bot account. –sumone10154(talk) 01:23, 12 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, I'll request bot approval on the other language versions as well. –sumone10154(talk) 20:21, 12 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've fixed about 2000 dmoz links; if there are still anymore broken ones, let me know and I'll see how they were missed.

I can also replace all wts:category links with links to commons categories. However, there are some categories that are named differently, or might not even exist on commons. My bot cannot check when this is the case; should I still do these replacements, or should they be done manually? –sumone10154(talk) 02:01, 13 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I think if the wts: replacement cannot be done accurately then it would be better to skip that article, and we can either update it manually or wait until Sumone's bot 9000™ has been created to use secret technology to more accurately determine commons links (perhaps by following Wikipedia interwiki links and using the same Commons interwiki as the linked article?). -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:49, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
That last sounds interesting. I'll look into it. -- The Anome (talk) 20:03, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Update: To get a direct interwiki link to a commons category such as [[Commons:Category:London]], which seems to be what is required here, I think the easiest path to follow would be Wikivoyage article -[interwiki]-> Wikipedia article -[category link]-> Wikipedia category -[interwiki]-> commons category. There's also Template:Commons_category, on enwiki, but it's not present on many pages, for example, enwp:London, where it might normally be expected. Coupled with all the necessary cross-checks, this seems like a lot of work for the benefit involved: so, all things being considered, I'll give this one a pass for now, and look for some bot tasks with greater cost-benefit ratio in the short term. -- The Anome (talk) 17:53, 16 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
We could also remove all wts links first and then add Commons links en masse. --Globe-trotter (talk) 20:55, 14 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've now added Commons links en masse, and am looking to remove the wts: links from all articles with Commons links, prior to surveying the remaining wts: links in other articles -- please see the discussion in the sub-section above. -- The Anome (talk) 19:19, 9 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
All Yes Done. See above. -- The Anome (talk) 21:04, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Crochet.david (talk) 20:29, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]


  • Botmaster: User:Carsrac
  • Bot's name: User:CarsracBot
  • List of bot flags on other projects: full list (all wikipediaprojects) Globalbot bit.
  • Purpose: interwiki
  • Technical details: pywikipediabot, latest versions

Carsrac (talk) 17:30, 18 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support K7L (talk) 17:44, 18 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment I'm in favor of automating as many tasks as we can possibly automate, but could you clarify what this bot does? Does it just search for articles with the same name, does it ensure that interwiki links to a target article are also present from a target article? I'd like to better understand what this does before flipping the bit. -- Ryan • (talk) • 18:11, 18 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • It does check the interwiki links and adds and removes the links. It does actively seek interwiki links by searching for articles with the same name or translation of the that name. With places and other geographical names and the job is very simple. Other wiki's are much harder to interwiki for a bot :) Carsrac (talk) 19:56, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment This looks to be interwiki.py, a script in the pywikipediabot bundle which has been used for a decade on Wikipedia to generate interwiki links. If en:Germany links to fr:Allemagne and fr:Allemagne links to de:Deutschland, the script creates the "in other languages" links to link the en: and de: articles to each other, as well as creating corresponding reverse links (so fr:Allemagne and de:Deutschland link to en:Germany). It is bright enough to detect if an existing "in other languages" link points to a disambiguation, a redirect or a deleted page. K7L (talk) 18:45, 18 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support and flagged. --Peter Talk 19:30, 18 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • The disambig detection does not fully works on all the wikivoyageproject at a way that the pywikipediabot's can pick it up automaticly. I'm aware of this problem I will at this moment not interwiki disambig pages until it's is solved. Carsrac (talk) 21:16, 24 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Riley Huntley (talk) 09:40, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am boldy plunging forward and doing the same for Template:Graffiti wall. -- Cheers, Riley 21:18, 20 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

-- Cheers, Riley 09:46, 26 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This script was blocked for lacking a nomination, so I'm nominating it here. From the description:

This bot syncs user and user talk pages across all wikis. Syncs can be requested here. Feel free to complain if it does anything it shouldn't. Every request gets performed and reviewed by Hoo man.

This looks to be a standard bot run across Wikimedia projects, so I see no harm in letting it run here.

Thanks for flagging the bot. It will keep editing this wiki then. - Hoo man (talk) 14:29, 3 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]


  • Botmaster: user:Inas
  • Bot's name: User:Inasbot
  • Purpose: Rename Contact Header to Connect in main namespace travel guides.
  • Technical details: pywikipediabot, replace.py

Since, this needs to be done, and noone else has volunteered to run it.. --Inas (talk) 10:22, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yep. I've run over a heap of files in the main namespace, so I'm confident that part will be fine. Whether I can actually sweep the entire main namespace without cluttering up recent changes with bot edits for months is another matter, but we'll see. I've set up the testcases at User:Inasbot/testcases. If there are any others you feel it needs to pass/fail, you can add them. --Inas (talk) 11:15, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Done. --Inas (talk) 11:17, 28 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of unused templates appears to have general support.--Traveler100bot (talk) 14:02, 3 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I assume I need to apply or at lease check again if I expand the logic? Would like to do the following:

Article with {{outline}} change to {{outlineregion}} if section title ==Cities== exists on the page.

Have check with a few manual checks of semi-automatic run and appears to work fine.--Traveler100 (talk) 15:39, 9 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Change articles with {{outline}} to {{outlinecity}} or {{outlineregion}} or {{outlinepark}} based on following logic-

  • if contains ==Cities==|==Towns and villages==|==Regions==|==Cities and towns==|is a region
    • make outlineregion
  • if contains is a city|is a town|is a village|is the main city|is the capital city
    • make outlinecity
  • if contains ==Fees/Permits==
    • make outlinepark

Have tested manually on 120 pages edited 60 other skipped. --Traveler100 (talk) 13:48, 29 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Probably the last possibility to do anything automatic on the deprecated tags, and has a small risk of making a mistake.

After running a number of variations with manual check of each edit for a few days I now think I have a script that will correct telephone numbers. It does not correct all and will skip many that have odd formats. So this will not totally remove, but will hopefully reduce the numbers of Listing with phone missing country code and Listing with phone format issue pages. This is not just to have some consistency but also to allow dialling from links in Wikivoyage on a smart phone. Would now like to propose running it as a bot.Traveler100 (talk) 20:00, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, go ahead. Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:12, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Can you provide some links to sample edits that the bot will make? I'm fully in support of cleaning up some of the messy phone numbers on the site, but I'd like to better understand what exactly is going to be changed. -- Ryan • (talk) • 01:58, 2 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
edits with current logic --Traveler100bot (talk) 05:33, 2 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Here, the bot removed hyphens; was this based on the bot's knowledge that 7-digit-dialing is allowed in the 518 area code? Or was it a general policy to remove hyphens between the area code and the local number? LtPowers (talk) 16:18, 2 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It removes hyphen been area code and local. Which is my understanding of current recommendation. --Traveler100 (talk) 18:54, 2 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Based on the edit history, is the bot just doing US phone numbers? When I was doing the text-to-template conversions for listings I found a wide variety of formats used for non-US listings. Assuming this is only for the US, and assuming LtPowers' concerns can be addressed, then support from me. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:09, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
No I intend to do it for each country, just the easiest way to ensure getting the country code correct is to do one country at a time (have already done Germany manually). Do I assume from the comment that the format <country code>blank<region code>blank<local number with dashes> should only be applied to USA? --Traveler100 (talk) 05:30, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Be careful with other countries - I encountered all manner of strange formats, particularly with some of the India articles, and my parser often failed to even recognize the numbers as phone numbers. As to formatting specifics, hopefully someone else can answer that - I've never cared enough about the nuances of date formatting, phone number formatting, etc and have left it to others to battle over those details. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:39, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Traditionally we have used hyphens to indicate what parts of a phone number can be dialed locally. So, in the U.S., we would use "+1-800-555-5555" for toll-free numbers, "+1 212-555-5555" for areas with mandatory 10-digit dialing, and "+1 518 555-5555" for areas with 7-digit dialing. LtPowers (talk) 14:29, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Actually that should be "+1-212-555-5555", all eleven digits required on a local call. K7L (talk) 02:28, 4 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Then why do they call it ten-digit dialing? =) LtPowers (talk) 12:17, 4 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
They don't. From , ten-digit dial is a Boston-style number " 617 MA 10D" but NYC/LA/Chicago are "1+10D". Effectively, there is no such thing as a flat rate local call in these three cities or their immediate area, everything is metered. A call across the street to "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" from Madison Square Gardens is +1-212-736-5000, eleven digits, same as if the call were made from Honolulu. "212 NY 1+10D" K7L (talk) 18:14, 4 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, sorry; I didn't realize you meant specifically the 212 area code. In that case, I erred in my choice of example. I was just trying to think of an overlaid area code off the top of my head, but I inadvertently chose one with special rules attached. Feel free to substitute some other overlaid area code like 416, perhaps. LtPowers (talk) 21:04, 4 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Botmaster: user:SteveR
  • Bot's name: User:SteveRBot
  • Purpose: Ukrainian wikivoyage was launched recently. Bot adds interwiki from uk.wikivoyage and other voyages if needed.
  • Technical details: Bot uses pywikipediabot library. On en.wikivoyage bot will use interwiki.py only. You can read about it here. --SteveR (talk) 17:25, 1 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Add pagebanner template to location pages in Austria as describe at User:Traveler100bot and discussion at Wikivoyage_talk:TOC/Banner. --Traveler100 (talk) 05:12, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

--Kolega2357 (talk) 23:08, 12 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What is your problem Rschen7754? You are so complexed from me. Bot has its own folder, not the other Wiki projects in the same folder. Do not make war changes. Run it like this python interwiki.py -autonomous -start:A -lang:en. --Kolega2357 (talk) 07:45, 13 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Pashley: I placed request everywhere a local bureaucrats. --Kolega2357 (talk) 09:20, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Can someone administrator to unblock my bot has been more than a month he is currently inactive. --Kolega2357 (talk) 21:47, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Why? There's no reason that it needs an unblock. --Rschen7754 22:05, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There a reason I saw this and Wikivoyages migrating interwiki to Wikidata. I'm here to signatured. --Kolega2357 (talk) 22:13, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That does not mean that we have to give you bot access; there's plenty of other bot operators. --Rschen7754 23:12, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose for the time being. I can't even figure out what the proposed task of this bot is. We haven't started using Wikidata yet, and if the proposal is just updating interwiki links, we already have working and tested bots handling those; I don't think we'd need or want multiple bots trying to do the same task simultaneously. If the proposal is something else, that needs to be explained, covering the three key points listed at the top of the page. -- D. Guillaume (talk) 23:16, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Why so biased user Rschen7754? I'm want to get a bot flag here. If all interested operators bot can do it in the near future, then why can not I? What is the purpose of it all can, and I can not? Assume good faith. --Kolega2357 (talk) 23:27, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Approval for a bot flag here requires that there are no outstanding objections to the request, and since current objections are related to the concerns raised at commons:Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive 41#Kolega2357 you will need to provide a link to a discussion or some other evidence demonstrating that those issues have been successfully resolved. Until that is done, it is probably pointless to continue to request permissions here. -- Ryan • (talk) • 23:53, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No more such problem I no more FileMover rights on Commons. I have a bot flag on several Wikivoyage projects. --Kolega2357 (talk) 00:21, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, because they are mostly inactive and/or were not aware of your crosswiki record. --Rschen7754 02:11, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

XML listings to templates

Designed to convert the legacy XML listings to templated listings per Wikivoyage talk:Listings#Tags to templates. See Special:Contributions/Wrh2Bot for a sample run against the first 100 articles (alphabetically) in the main namespace, and User:Wrh2Bot/ListingsToTemplate for log output. The bot converts well-formatted XML to a template. In cases where the bot cannot reliably convert the listing (due to mis-matched tags or other errors) then the bot skips the listing and writes a message to the log (I have to manually upload logs here). If approved I can probably kick this off over the weekend when I'm back home and will have time to monitor it. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:19, 16 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've got code ready that will convert links of the form '''Bold text''' [http://www.example.com] to '''[http://www.example.com Bold text]''', per the latest changes to Wikivoyage:External links. This code currently works ONLY for the specific pattern mentioned - if the text preceding the link is not bold it won't match, but this is a start that should get a significant portion of the site updated. See the following tests:

I'll investigate options for converting additional links in a future update, but it's a tricky job. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:35, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support. Those tests were successful, and I can't think of an instance where this wouldn't be desirable. Tackling this chore piecemeal like seems a good idea. It probably goes without saying, but this is just for the Mainspace, right? --Peter Talk 05:00, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, mainspace only. If it gets the OK I'll run it in a few small batches so I can keep an eye on things, but I don't expect there will be issues with a pattern this simple. While this bot won't convert all footnote links, it should at least get the official city link at the start of articles, which is a prominent enough link to make this worth running. -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:06, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. Definitely a job for bots, and a cautious pattern like that should avoid false positives well. Agreed that it needs to remain mainspace-only for now, as your sandbox test pages in User: space are clearly still excluded from the new CSS. -- D. Guillaume (talk) 05:07, 2 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Just over 7000 articles updated. -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:30, 3 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nice. Are there any in the pattern ''Italic text'' [http://www.example.com]? If so, that should be an easy change to your code, so straightforward to do next. Pashley (talk) 04:45, 3 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Peter started a list of potential patterns at Wikivoyage talk:External links#Bot suggestions, although we'll need to be careful as it is very easy to pick up false positives. The italics pattern would be a good one to add to the list, and it definitely shouldn't trigger any false positives. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:56, 3 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Text-to-template Conversion

For a couple of weeks I've been testing a bot that converts plain text listings to use the appropriate version of Template:Listing. More details can be found at Wikivoyage talk:Listings#Text-to-template conversion, but the high-level overview is that the bot is pretty conservative, and will only convert fields when it has a very high probability of getting the conversion right. If it is unsure, the listing is either not converted, or if a particular field is questionable it is simply left as part of the listing "content" field where someone can manually move it to the right field later on. There is still the rare false positive - for example, in this edit the opening sentence "This 3 small churches built around St.Bogorodica Perivlepta" was interpreted as containing a street address ("3 small churches built around St.") - but these are pretty rare and easily cleaned up.

We'll never get a bot that can convert with 100% accuracy (or a human who won't make occasional mistakes, for that matter), and after literally testing and reviewing hundreds of edits I think this bot is worth running, but will wait a few days for any objections (and the required support votes) before doing so. See Special:Contributions/Wrh2Bot for a history of bot testing - to this point I have manually reviewed every single edit made and tweaked it to improve accuracy, but would now like to unleash the bot to run on its own. -- Ryan • (talk) • 04:59, 19 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support. While it may make a little mess on some of the items, all of the items it's converting are basically a mess already. It's too big a job to do by hand; this will save us a lot of time in the long run. --Peter Talk 05:16, 19 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support - This will further modernise and standardise our guides and ensure that we are more ready for future features such as dynamic maps. Thanks for your hard work on this! James A ▪ talk 06:33, 19 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

See meta:User:Addbot. Wikivoyage will be enabled on wikidata next week. My bot taking interwiki links from pages, puts them on wikidata and then removes interwiki links that are no longer needed from articles. This is a task that is currently running on all language wikipedia projects with over 14 million edits and it would be great to also get approval here! Addshore (talk) 12:22, 19 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Question - is this a task that global bots are automatically approved to do? If so then global bots can run here without additional approval. If this isn't a global bot task, then support from me for your specific bot. -- Ryan • (talk) • 14:52, 19 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support trusted user and trusted bot, though it may be moot with the global bot issue (I'm not entirely sure on that myself). --Rschen7754 23:44, 19 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

User:Andyrom bot removal of unknown Print= parameter

I've seen that several images have this parameter that has been imported from WT. Both in voy and WT this parameter it's not managed by the parser, so it must be removed. Although it's an easy task I'm making right now 50 test modification so anyone can verify them. --Andyrom75 (talk) 18:44, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It was handled by Wikitravel Press's parser. There's probably no reason to keep them, unlike other WTP legacy syntax, but neither is there any urgency to remove them. LtPowers (talk) 13:43, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Peter, thanks for giving me that background, I didn't know anything about it. And I didn't know that you were selling book! :-D If you know other syntax (print= a part), just let me know and I'll remove them as well. Clearly it's not urgent, but I tend to eliminate what is useless to avoid that it could create confusion within the editors or in the layout like in those cases where the images has no description, so the caption is "print=...." --Andyrom75 (talk) 18:56, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Peter who? =) LtPowers (talk) 18:32, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]


This bot approval applied only to removal of print parameters from image tags. It did not have authorization to remove other items. LtPowers (talk) 19:01, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've cleaned all the WTP legacy syntax explained in the page you linked. Going into details:
  • Removing of all the print= occurrences
  • Removing of all the angle= occurrences
  • Removing of the redundant text between PRINT "tag-comment" (redundant because all these occurrences have the same/similar text inthe article)
  • Removing of the WEB-START & WEB-END "tag-comment" leaving the text between them
If you think I've made a mistake on that let me know and I'll revert my work without any problem. --Andyrom75 (talk) 21:44, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
To make a perfect job, I suggest to orphanize also the Template:Pagebreak and Template:Index, both used by WTP and applied on few articles. Feel free to discuss about it internally. I don't think I'll be strictly necessary for this operation, but let me know if I can help on other topics. --Andyrom75 (talk) 21:50, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I apologize if I wasn't clear. Your bot was authorized only to remove "print=" attributes within File tags. None of the other stuff you mentioned was even brought up in this discussion, and your bot had no authorization to remove them. The "angle=" attribute removal is not harmful, but removing the PRINT and WEB-START/END tags was potentially so. Each of those cases needs to be addressed individually, and a bot should not be removing them wholesale. Period. Please revert those changes ASAP. LtPowers (talk) 23:05, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If you think it's critical & urgent the quickest way is that an admin revert all the changes of the bot with just one click. Otherwise it will take time, and although WTS doesn't work neither here and in WT, I don't want to slow down your request. --Andyrom75 (talk) 23:14, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't rollback all of the edits because I didn't want to lose the good ones. It's probably not urgent; it's just that the longer we go before undoing them, the harder they may be to undo. Make sense? LtPowers (talk) 01:49, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If it's not so urgent maybe could worth to take few minute to understand if all can be consider "good ones" and if we really want to restore the other tags that are not used by the wikimedia parser. For example, "angle=" was used jointly with "print=" so why to keep the first while we are removing the second?
Inside the PRINT tag comment, you can find two kind of commented wikitext.
  • The same image already shown in the article (usually few lines above)
  • The same text already written in the article (I remember an infobox that used a different template, and the regionlist description without the use of the regionlist template)
So, being redundant and not being shown in any media (because it's commented and not managed differently) why to keep it?
The WEB-START/END tag were used to delimit a text shown only via web, but currently this TAG doesn't work and the text are shown in any media, and I would say correctly, like the ones that are in a phrasebook that contains almost the whole the article. As written above, why to keep a useless comment?
PS Sorry for the late answer but here was sleeping time :-) --Andyrom75 (talk) 07:12, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As I said above, "Each of those cases needs to be addressed individually, and a bot should not be removing them wholesale." Are you certain that every case is the same? LtPowers (talk) 17:06, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
If you feel that we have enough time we can discuss about them one by one (I don't think it would take so much time). I'm not sure to understand what do you mean with "every case is the same"; could you rephrase it? --Andyrom75 (talk) 19:28, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
You seemed confident that in every instance in which these tags were used, they could be removed without concern. I was asking if you were sure about that. Anyway, I was kind of hoping that some other contributors would chime in here. LtPowers (talk) 02:06, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Aren't all the tags just remnants of WT Press? To determine what made the print guide and what was web only? I can't see they have any use, and although I agree with the point that they shouldn't have been removed without discussion, I think we have a short window to discuss to see if we should keep before reversion. --Inas (talk) 04:03, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thank LT for the clarification. I'm pretty sure that the tag can be removed (otherwise I wouldn't have done it). And I haven't processed them all in an automatic way. I've made test to be sure that the layout wouldn't have any kind of change, and I've verified, expecially for the PRINT tag the presence of the equivalent removed text (inside the tags) outside those tags. The WEB tags should be used to hidden the text inside those tags so it has 0 impact on screen, and without a dedicated parser (like WTS) that process them in that way, those tag are useless. Furthermore, in the Japanese prhasebook the WEB tags were used in a strange way because they included almosto the whole article, and it doesn't make sense to avoid its print on paper. --Andyrom75 (talk) 10:19, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, yes, tags are not currently functional, as far as preventing web-only content from being printed. (Jani deleted Template:Web and all of its uses a while back, even though we could have maintained its functionality by including it in Category:Exclude in print. The WTP-only method of using HTML comments doesn't have this advantage.) I would just hate to lose this semantic information -- even if it doesn't actually do anything at the moment -- the way we lost Template:Web. LtPowers (talk) 13:22, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
This functionality could be easily restored in a different way: through CSS, where you can classify the content for specific devices like mobiles & printers, or to avoid that those devices would receive specific content. A parser it's not necessary for this task. If interersted to go deeper on this topic, maybe we can keep discussing in another page. --Andyrom75 (talk) 15:56, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, there are ways to replicate the functionality, but some of it may not be needed anymore if current printing methods work better than WTP's did. That's why I said we have to go through each case individually rather than just remove them all. LtPowers (talk) 16:51, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The fact is that the logic on how CSS works is different, so different is their implementation and cannot be (for example) replaced 1 by 1. Usually the CSS should be included in template so that you'll have the control over the whole site instead of the single piece of article. Just to mention an example. I've removed a bunch of text that was a "printable copy" of a regionlist. The right way to do it is to work on Template:Regionlist and not on a specific article. --Andyrom75 (talk) 17:27, 11 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Granted, but that seems all the more reason to go through one-by-one instead of simply removing them. LtPowers (talk) 00:17, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm still inclined to think that the basis for them was editorial by WTP. Personally, if I get a print, I'd like to have all the info that is present on the web with automatic formatting applied as appropriate. I don't want anyone making a manual call on what information should be excluded from my print. The fact that they aren't even currently functional, is the clincher. --Inas (talk) 01:43, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Inas, I agree with you, also because, especially for printing, doesn't comes up to my mind any site that use properly (cum grano salis ;-)) a customized printed version. A good and complete article should be passed as it is to all the media. However I do not exclude that with a deep study, few templates could be modified to show differently the same content (NOT a different content! just the layout). --Andyrom75 (talk) 09:49, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fine, if we want to do this the hard way. Here is an example where Template:Web was used to exclude notations that make sense only in a linked environment. Here is another case where it was used to exclude a disambiguation notice, which is completely useless in print. Here (see last change) is a case where it was used to avoid printing a lengthy URL that is very similar to (and accessible from) a link earlier in the paragraph. Here it was used to avoid printing a link to a PDF. And that's just Template:Web; I haven't even gotten to the WEB-START/END cases. LtPowers (talk) 14:08, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think the way was used that template it's not so much different from how the WTS works. The principle is the same, with just the technical benefit that it's easier to manage, so I wouldn't resurrect it. If you are interested to differentiate the output, you should think different. Let's talk of one of the examples that you have mentioned: the disambiguation note. If I'm not wrong we should have a template for that, maybe is in en:voy as well. So the idea is to use that template any time and everywhere you need to show a disambiguation note, and then to apply the CSS patch to that template. Otherwise you'll flood all the article with that too general template that only complicate the editor's lives. IMHO this kind of patches, to be effective, should be transparent, otherwise people would naturally wreck this kind of initiatives just not applying them. --Andyrom75 (talk) 16:40, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
What do you mean by "WTS"? Also, I'm not sure we disagree; I'm all for putting this stuff into templates. My concern is that we are losing this semantic information by removing the markup without supplying a replacement, even if the replacement is currently not fully functional. LtPowers (talk) 17:21, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry I've just mistype, I meant WTP :-) In my opinion we are not losing anything valuable, because the cleaned tag are not useful for the scope. I suppose (and I hope) that WTP was designed before the CSS was able to managed the different media layout, because nowadays, no one would design it in that way, it's too complicated from both programming and using point of view. --Andyrom75 (talk) 20:12, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The point is, I don't want to miss out on the link to the Chicago Skyline Guide just because I print something. When WTP were publishing stuff they did. They wanted a published book without these hooks. We don't want to exclude this information from the print version any longer. --Inas (talk) 20:51, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Why not? What good is a disambiguation notice in a printout? LtPowers (talk) 23:15, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
We're not addressing the issue. These things were put in the articles for books published by WTP. If we don't want otheruses to render in certain views, then we should make that change to the template/css. We're not preserving anything here by keeping these formatting guidelines for WTP in the articles. Keeping these won't stop otheruses from appearing in the 99.9% of print article in which WTP never got involved. --Inas (talk) 23:48, 12 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I realize this; what I'm failing to communicate is that keeping these artifacts allows us to easily find and fix cases where we might want or need to maintain that functionality. If they are removed, they become that much harder to track down and replace. LtPowers (talk) 01:13, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I just think the chances of us ever actually manually marking up our articles for a print view is so wildly remote, that I think having this info is still in the history is more than sufficient. It isn't as if someone is going to add any more of these, or we are going to use the same tags. The target articles can always be identified. However, if we go down this path, the only way I can ever see this working is templates like otheruses could be excluded from a print view, and these tags don't help us there. I understand it can be difficult to let go of the WTP idea, but I don't see it ever being reborn in that form. Any future view is going to be some form of automation applied to existing templates and css, and not manual classification. --Inas (talk) 01:29, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see why; there's no reason we can't write guides for print as well as for web use. LtPowers (talk) 02:04, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Lt, IMHO you should separate the two discussions.
  1. WTP implementation is totaly wrong, and can't be an example for anything right now. This discussion should close this thread.
  2. Having a different layout for other media (printer included) is possible but must be rethink from scratch. This discussion should be held in a dedicated thread. If you think that it's a strategic topic, you can open an expedition (if it doesn't already exist ... I hanve't checked yet).
IMHO too also Template:web is a wrong approach, but this topic is related to the second point and not to the first one. --Andyrom75 (talk) 06:53, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not the one conflating the two discussions. The point remains that your bot exceeded its approved remit. We should revert the excess changes and do them the right way, by replacing them where necessary with functional code, not simply removing it and forcing us in the future to dig through histories to find them. LtPowers (talk) 13:18, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As you prefer, in fact my first replay was you can revert them all, but in my opinion this would reintroduce useless code in en:voy. Believe me, I have no personal interest on convincing you (a funny quote says that opinions are like testicles, everyone has their own :-D ), I've just tried to explain you which would be the right solution to the different media issue. --Andyrom75 (talk) 13:49, 13 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

ArchiverBot

Since it looks like at least some find it useful, I would like to run User:ArchiverBot for periodically archiving inactive sections on discussion pages. My bot is an unmodified copy of archivebot.py of Pywikibot, and will work on pages explicitly tagged with the marker template, with possible page-wise customization. It will need a bot flag to not disturb people watching the target pages. Suggested target pages include Wikivoyage:Tourist Office, nomination pages (possibly with some modifications either in the script or the archiving practice), and user talk pages (at the user's own will); these are merely suggestions and will not be implemented against objections. Whym (talk) 02:42, 8 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support from me based on the successful experiment already performed. Just to clarify, all someone has to do is tag a page with Template:Auto archiving and the bot will automatically archive it according to the parameters specified in the template (i.e. mw:Manual:Pywikibot/archivebot.py/setup#Template_parameters)? -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:37, 8 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yes, that's all. To clarify further, after a week or so of experiment I have suspended the daily run, because frequent archiving without the flag can be a nuisance. Once approved and flagged, I'll keep it running daily. Whym (talk) 09:20, 10 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • What procedure will we use to regulate which pages are being archived? Let's say someone, thinking they're being helpful, adds the template to the Pub; how easy would it be do undo the bot's subsequent actions? Powers (talk) 14:30, 8 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • Undoing and restoring archived discussions are not different from reverting any other edits; since these edits usually don't intersect with others' edits, simple undos or rollbacks without manual copy-and-paste would work. The bot has no special mechanism to help reverting. As for the regulation, it is advisable to establish explicit consensus when it involves significant changes such as a different scheme for subpages. That said, it's entirely up to the community. It looks like other wikis using this feature are doing fine with the spirit of w:Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle. Whym (talk) 09:20, 10 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
      • *bump* Can anyone else comment? All concerns raised have been addressed, but two admins must voice "support" before I can add the bot flag. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:50, 29 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
        • I'm afraid I still have concerns about well-intentioned users trying to archive pages that shouldn't be automatically archived. If it's a high traffic page, or one where the archival isn't noticed quickly, undoing the damage could be a significant time-waster. Powers (talk) 16:14, 29 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
          • How would that be different from a well-intentioned user manually doing the same thing? Unless I'm missing something the archive bot won't instantly archive a page the moment a tag is added, so unless someone doesn't revert the archive tag that is added to the high-traffic page there is plenty of time to undo any tagging. This bot seems like a simple way to save us some time, and to keep pages that often get overlooked (like user ban nominations) clean. Also consider that most other WMF wikis use this bot, and to the best of my knowledge they aren't having the problem you've described. -- Ryan • (talk) • 16:29, 29 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
            • Placed on a page that wasn't previously archived, I believe the bot would archive most of the page the next time it runs. Other wikis archive all of their talk pages the same so it doesn't matter if a bot does it or a human does it. Powers (talk) 02:22, 2 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
              • I'm going to rant and then quit watching this thread. It makes me despondent over the future of this project that we're vetoing a bot that runs successfully on all manner of other Wikimedia wikis because a user might tag a page incorrectly, and the bot might run before someone else removes the tag, and it might take 30 seconds to then click "revert" and undo those changes?!? We're not talking about whether we should change how pages are archived, we're simply adding support for a bot on Wikivoyage that can help us with how we already archive some existing pages. The fact that you won't relent on this minor point means that a contributor, who wants to help in a manner that is not in any way out of the norms for a wiki, is being told that his contributions aren't wanted here. Making that worse, we're citing a seemingly irrational fear that in the worst case we'll have to spend 30 seconds clicking "revert" if the bot goes wrong as the justification. Why should anyone else who has a bot that might be helpful want to deal with us if we can't even approve something as obvious as an archive bot? The failure of this script nomination is absolutely, without a doubt, the wrong result - we need new contributors and new ideas, but instead this insane level of conservatism and bureaucracy is going to kill this project, if it hasn't already mortally wounded it. -- Ryan • (talk) • 02:52, 2 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
                • I don't think it's helpful to have a conniption every time I express doubt about a well-intentioned change you support, Ryan. Please note that I never opposed the approval of this bot; I merely declined to be the second admin to take responsibility for approving it. Is that really such a grievous offense, considering we have dozens of other admins who could (and now, have) easily provided the second support you desired? At least I bothered to comment. Powers (talk) 19:35, 2 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Powers, would it help if I set up the bot to check pages once a week, instead of daily? That would reduce the chance that an unwelcome addition of the template triggers archiving before anyone notices. It will probably be frequent enough until there is a very busy page that needs archiving. (IIRC, some en.wikipedia page needs twice-a-day archiving, but that's probably that wiki only.) Whym (talk) 13:52, 2 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Technically I am not a maintainer of this bot (It's bot by Magnus Manske) but I would like to ask for botflag on behalf of the Commons Administrators - who deletes the images, who occationally commands to replace files across wikis. This bot exists to assist Commons administrator's deletion, by removing usage of deleted files, and replacing files. (i.e. If Commons admin commands, bot will replace A.jpg to AB.jpg across wikimedia wikis.) By default, to prevent false positive, it waits for 10 minutes (or shorter) after deletion before CommonsDelinker starts delinking. And after then, bot will query GlobalUsage to see where it is used, and go to the page and remove the file.

— Revi 15:01, 25 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

So, this is my own bot. While browsing RC, I found this edit, and surprised that no bots were fixing them. I would like to fix this by my bot. My bot is approved on multiple wikis (kowiki, kowikisource, kowikicersity, Commons, meta and etc) to run this task, and this task is in the scope of "automatic approval". The bot's edit frequency depends on the cache update of Special:DoubleRedirects. (No edits are performed for now, because backlog is clean)

— Revi 17:08, 28 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Copy and paste detection bot

Swept in from the pub

Many of you may already know that often people do blatant plagiarism here by simply copy pasting chunk of paragraphs to our guides. Such copy paste violate copyright on the one side while decrease the search engine ranking of the guide on the other, due to duplication. Recently I came across a bot on Wikipedia User:EranBot which auto detect copy and paste content. I think it would be helpful to have such a bot running here so that it can help us tackling copyvio and duplication issues. Eran, the creator of the bot is agree to setup the bot here if the community is interested. --Saqib (talk) 19:36, 8 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a great idea to me. Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:53, 8 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If I'm reading the bot description correctly then it just generates a report of potential copyvio edits. Sounds useful, so full support from me - let's get this on WV:Script nominations. -- Ryan • (talk) • 20:03, 8 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The bot ran on edits in the last day and found 1 possible copyright violation in User:EranBot/Copyright. I will config it to run automatically everyday and to update this page. ערן (talk) 20:48, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you Eran. Is it ready to get flagged as BOT now? --Saqib (talk) 20:55, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a way to tell the bot to ignore certain sites? The edit that was flagged was one I made, and in the edit summary I noted that some of the content was from nps.gov, which is a public domain site. -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:10, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think we shouldn't ignore any site including those under public domain. We always have been against duplicative content, even those copy pasted from freely licensed sites such as Wikipedia. Offcourse otherwise people will still able to do plagrism if we add some websites into the ignore list. I don't think there's any harm if BOT keep notifying us about copy-pasted material taken from Wikipedia and websites under public domain. --Saqib (talk) 21:29, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Copy from public domain sites - There is User:EranBot/Copyright/Blacklist which you can extend to avoid certain sites, but it is intended to be used for sites that copy Wikipedia/Wikivoyage (mirrors). The bot can indicate sites that declare themselves as creative-commmons license (if there is a link to CC license from the site). It doesn't have currently similar indication for PD material because I have no good heuristic how to infer it from the site (.gov is probably not enough as even US government sites may use copyrighted material in some pages).
In general I agree with Saqib that it is usually good idea to avoid duplication of material even for freely licensed content (not always) but there is no legal problem here (and if you cite the source properly no ethic problem too) - so you can set it as FP in such cases. BTW: In case you decide to copy some content from other source it is important to add reference to the source from the text itself - the bot will indicate such edit as "citation" and readers will be able to validate the content here compared to the source.
  • Bot rights - The bot will edit only User:EranBot/Copyright and only 1 or few times a day, so I think it can be safe to give it bot rights.
Eran (talk) 21:51, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The argument for not ignoring sites makes sense, particularly since this bot is primarily a notification tool. I have two minor concerns about flagging the account: 1) since the bot account was just created it seems only fair to wait a bit longer to give others a chance to comment and 2) if this bot is just updating a page of notifications, flagging the account as a bot will hide updates to that page from recent changes and watchlists for most users, so would it make sense to make an exception in this case and leave it unflagged? I don't think there would be any downside to having this run without the bot flag, but I might be missing something?
Thanks Eran for setting this up! -- Ryan • (talk) • 22:09, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Ryan, you can leave the bot unflaged for the good reasons you mentioned. I can think of only 1 (theoretically) downside for it - there is a different limit for queries and edits for bots from regular users (detailed in: Special:ListGroupRights), but the bot use labs DB for must queries and not API so it doesn't matter. Eran (talk) 22:46, 10 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The bot fails to save the results due to captcha (a new user adding new link). Can you please assign the bot user one of the rights in Special:ListGroupRights associated with skipcaptcha (e.g bots/confirmed). thanks, Eran (talk) 22:08, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Noted Eran. Hope Ryan will take care of it and assign the bot required uer rights. BTW: Is it safe to remove notifications from User:EranBot/Copyright after cleaning up the copyvio? --Saqib (talk) 22:39, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it is safe to clear notifications, but it is preferred to set TP or FP status and only then remove entries, so we can gather statistics on the effectiveness of the tool. Eran (talk) 04:43, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Bot and (auto)confirmed are the only groups that obviate the CAPTCHA requirement, and I'm afraid I can't assign the confirmed status manually (see Wikivoyage talk:Confirmed users; you may just have to wait the four days. I suppose I could add the bot flag and then remove it once it's autoconfirmed. Let me know which is preferable. Powers (talk) 23:12, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to have a bot rights for the bot for few days. thanks, Eran (talk) 04:43, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes Done -- Ryan • (talk) • 05:05, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@ערן: The bot account should be old enough to be autoconfirmed at this point. Would it be OK if I removed the bot flag so that edits appear in the unfiltered recent changes, per the discussion above? -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:39, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Ryan, yes you can remove the bot flag. Eran (talk) 21:14, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes Done -- Ryan • (talk) • 21:26, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

User:Wrh2Bot - Flag broken external links

I'd like to tag broken external links with {{dead link}}. By default this tag will not be visible to users who have not enabled the ErrorHighlighter gadget from Special:Preferences, but users who have enabled that gadget will see a "dead link" note next to the invalid link, making it very easy to find and fix bad links in articles. Pages with broken links are also added to Category:Articles with dead external links‎‎. See this edit to New York City and this edit to Chicago for examples of what the bot would be doing. Assuming two people support this bot my plan is to initially run the bot slowly and manually review all edits it makes to ensure that there are no false positives. Also of note, the way I've set up the bot is that if a link isn't obviously broken - for example, if the site returns "server error" or some other indication of a potentially temporary problem - the bot won't flag the link in order to avoid false positives. -- Ryan • (talk) • 03:44, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Update: I've run the bot against all star articles, so Category:Articles with dead external links‎‎ now contains a number of articles that can be reviewed to see how the bot will work. It broke one link in the process, so I'll need to figure out a fix, but the link in question was a mess to start with - search for "Golders Hill Park" in the following diff: Special:Diff/2909329/2968987. -- Ryan • (talk) • 00:11, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Support - This is a great tool, checking manually is a very long job. Broken links can highlight closed businesses or just that web addresses have changed. This will help us increase the quality of articles, making it more useful to readers and increase our search engine rankings. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:43, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Would like to see it check links twice a few days apart, before updating. A similar tool in OSM produces a remarkable amount of false positives. --Inas (talk) 08:50, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The current version of the bot is designed to only flag links where the server explicitly returns 404 (file not found) or if the DNS lookup returns "unknown host" (indicating that there is no longer a website at that domain). I think that should eliminate false positives due to issues that would otherwise be resolved by checking twice, although it could also miss some invalid links - for example, in the Santa Monica article a link was set to "https" but the site only supported "http", and the bot doesn't currently flag that scenario (I manually fixed it in this edit after noticing the error in the bot output on my laptop). In addition, if the bot is re-run against an article it will remove all existing {{dead link}} tags and only re-tag articles that fail, so if a link is tagged as broken due to a temporary problem with the external site it should be un-tagged the next time the bot runs. For the first iteration hopefully that's OK, and I could then look to do something like storing failure history for edge cases and flagging more difficult links after multiple failures for a future enhancement. Does that seem reasonable? -- Ryan • (talk) • 14:51, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It does. --Inas (talk) 02:18, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Great idea. Support. Pashley (talk) 09:17, 8 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Could it indicate whether the web site is not found or it got a 404? This would be helpful to anyone trying to fix it, though it is not essential since the fixer will of course test the link. Pashley (talk) 08:42, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

User:AndreeBot - improve listings/regionlists

Currently, many areas are really basic - like Buryatia, What I'd like to do is try to automatically gather the geolocs from the referred articles and create listing|type=city, so that we can later easily show those on map (and visually navigate through the articles). Similarly, I'd like to convert region lists to use templates (e.g. Middle Hills). I already have some basic scripts for this, so I want to avoid flooding the 'recent changes' wall.

Another task is adding wikidata links to the listings that already have wikipedia link. In many cases, these listings have no image or location, or url - these could be relatively easily added as well. Andree.sk (talk) 18:55, 21 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Support - I was thinking about adding lat/longs to cities on region articles manually but using a bot is obviously a much idea. Gizza (roam) 02:19, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support - I imagine there might be some problems, but nothing awful & it is basically a fine idea. Pashley (talk) 08:28, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support - as long as adding and not overriding information. Maybe run a random sample of about 20 first so can see what is created. --Traveler100 (talk) 09:07, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support the Wikidata proposal (see list of target articles, at Category:Listing with Wikipedia link but not Wikidata link). No view on the other. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:37, 22 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think these sound like very good ideas. I like Traveler100's suggestion of running a sample of a few pages so we can see exactly what the results look like. —Granger (talk · contribs) 00:46, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support - I think this is a great idea. I have just one question, why do you use listings and not markers? I think listings might look a bit weird in some cases, such as the example you posted on the user page Evenkia where we have just the name of the city followed by a period, which looks a bit odd. See for instance Île-de-France for an example where markers where used. Drat70 (talk) 04:52, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think semantically, listing is the right thing there - as ideally all those thing should (IMO) contain some short description, links to wikipedia and such - and should be editable by the wikivoyagers... Perhaps we should instead improve the listing template to not generate the period if there are not data in the listing (apart from loc+wiki links)? Andree.sk (talk) 07:38, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Drat70—cities with one-liner descriptions should use marker templates rather than listing templates. I don't think I've ever seen a region article that used listing templates for its cities, and I don't see any reason to include the Wikipedia and Wikidata links for them—if readers want to read about the city, they can click on the wikilink to go to our article about it. —Granger (talk · contribs) 14:29, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
My idea is to eventually have nice maps with clickable content, like Northern Hungary (see first 3 cities), mixed with clickable regions like Madrid. There are surely many ways to do it, but I'd say keeping wikidata references alongside the listings is the best way to keep it consistent in the future. In the end, volunteers can transform it further into Berne Region-like region lists, if there's nothing much to be said about the cities... In any case, I think this is not the right place for this discussion. listing|type=city can be transformed into anything else later on, depending on outcome of that discussion? Andree.sk (talk) 15:53, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that this is not the right place for this discussion. The existing practice is to use marker templates with one-liner descriptions; if you think we should change that practice, maybe the pub would be the right place to bring up that idea. —Granger (talk · contribs) 19:23, 23 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
OK sample size is large enough for first set of comments. --Traveler100 (talk) 12:09, 3 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Could you get the user id set to be a bot user so easier to filter out edits from watchlist.
I'd say this has to be done by some admin (assign bot rights to the bot). I tried setting the bot flag in the pywikibot framework, but it didn't do any change... I may be missing something, though.
  • Would it be possible to add the wikidata parameter next to the wikipedia parameter instead of at the end of the list?
Done, mwparserfromhell only allows prepending before [wikipedia] parameter, so that's going to be done...
  • Bot should also stop when entry made to talk page.
Done, forgot about it (but in the end the bot requires some manual involvement right now, anyway...) Andree.sk (talk) 15:25, 3 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
By "some admin" I presume that means a bureaucrat. K7L (talk) 22:00, 3 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Guys, I'm not sure I'll be able to finish the 1st part (listings/markers + region lists) too soon (likely weeks from now), so I suggest to give the bot the bot flag and I'll make it perform the 2nd task (wikipedia -> wikidata)... And once I have finished the 1st task, I'll get here to get feedback? I guess in the end, this whole bot thing is based on "trust" anyway? Andree.sk (talk) 19:14, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Was the question about listings vs. markers ever resolved? Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:18, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Not to my knowledge - it probably makes sense to first provide some samples, so we can continue it... In the meantime I came to terms with both possible outcomes (I really just want to make the region pages nicer, if easily possible), and don't care that much regarding markers/listings currently, so... :) Andree.sk (talk) 19:47, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it looks like there's plenty of support for this bot. Does the bot still need approval by a Bureaucrat? It looks like it was made an Autopatroller by an Admin. Is that good enough for your purposes? Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:31, 24 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Without the bot flag/group, the changes flood the "recent changes" log for the few hours it runs, even if it's autopatroller... Andree.sk (talk) 05:23, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I approved it as a bot. Let me know if I can help in any other way. Ikan Kekek (talk) 05:54, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Hi all, apologies for joining this discussion so late, but I only found it now by accident. I have a few comments on the proposal:

  • Regarding geo coordinates on WV region pages: This is a great idea. Before letting the bot loose, could I propose think about a further development of that: (almost) all the information required for a WV city one-liner is given somehwere on its page (e.g. in the "geo" template - that's why the bot would work). It would be much better, if this information would be extracted dynamically (and not statically as proposed now) from these pages, so that if someone changes the info there (e.g. geo coordinates, or link, or name/transcription in the native language), it is automatically changed everywhere else. If this is possible, something like "{{oneliner|Kilkenny}}", which would dynamically extract all the relevant info, would be enough to put on these pages.
    If this is possible, then I would suggest something on top of that: on each WV city page, a "one-liner" summary for that WV city could be defined (e.g. with "{{onelinersummary|Attractive medieval town, known as the Marble City and home to the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival, held annually in early June.}} for "Kilkenny"). That information could then also be extracted dynamically, and would not only benefit the WV region articles (under "Cities", "Other destinations"), but could also be reused in the "Go next" sections. The "oneliner" template should also provide the possibility of overwriting or adding to the automatically extracted values.
  • Regarding testing a bot: I think this should be done in a sandbox, e.g. by copying a selection of pages currently using different styles. Such tests should to my mind not be done on the live WV pages. But if you have enough good experience with testing it directly on the live WV pages, then go for it.
  • Regarding automatically overwriting content: I want to emphasize that this should not be done (without discussing the consequences). I encountered cases where correct geo coordinates were overwritten with values from wikidata, that were either completely wrong, or placed at a position not very useful for travelers. This was done by a user who seemed to mechanically go through many listings, which is almost like a bot.

Thanks for considering the above points. Xsobev (talk) 12:04, 25 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Instead of copying stuff, I used the new {{marker}} functionality to autofetch missing data from wikidata... So the above is now mostly a non-concern .-) I decided to not to anything with the short-descriptions for now, as it seems to be a sensitive topic... Andree.sk (talk) 17:50, 24 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Guys, the script seems to do +- what I imagined it should regarding the region preparation. Check the changes. In the end, I'll have to supervise the script, as every other region page has something special and causes the it to fail :) But you can speak up and say something, if you don't like the output (but I didn't do anything controversial, I even used markers instead of listings ;)). Otherwise I'll run it more batch-ly... Andree.sk (talk) 17:50, 24 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]


I propose that my bot reset Wikivoyage:Graffiti wall every hour, per discussion at Wikivoyage talk:Graffiti wall. It will be reset by substituting the contents of User:DannyS712 bot/reset, so that administrators can tweak what is the base text without needing to have me modify the bot code (the User:DannyS712 bot/reset page is fully protected). Happy to answer any questions, haven't written the code yet but should be pretty easy. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 19:09, 6 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

DannyS712 bot - automatically "patrol"ing reverted edits

If an edit is reverted via rollback, the original edit is automatically patrolled, but if it is reverted via manual undo or via a manual revert, the old edit is still not patrolled, and thus still shows up when searching for unpatrolled edits in Special:RecentChanges. Since these edits don't really need to be checked by human patrollers, since they have been reverted, I propose that they be automatically patrolled by a bot.

I haven't written the code for this yet, but essentially

  • query the api for recent changes that are edits and are not patrolled, and are tagged with the reverted edits tag ("rctag": "mw-reverted", "rcshow": "!patrolled")
  • for each resulting edit, mark it as patrolled via the api

Thoughts? If this has approval, I'll write the code and grant the patroller flag to the bot account to test it out. --DannyS712 (talk) 21:40, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. Go ahead. The dog2 (talk) 21:56, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like a good idea to me. —Granger (talk · contribs) 22:03, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I don't like this idea at all. The most active vandal on this site has reverted a lot of edits. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:50, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Just to make sure it's not a misunderstanding, I think this is to automatically mark as patrolled an edit that was reverted. If the person who reverted is not autopatrolled, the the revert itself will still be marked for patrolling, and patrollers can still go and have a look. The dog2 (talk) 00:19, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@The dog2 yes, that is correct. Consider the following:
  • User without autopatrol (or an IP) makes an edit, Edit A
  • Someone else reverts, Edit B
Unless rollback is used (which patrols reverted edits automatically), Edit A still needs to be manually patrolled. The bot would mark Edit A as patrolled, since it was reverted and so doesn't really need attention from human patrollers. The bot doesn't care about Edit B DannyS712 (talk) 00:22, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
In that case, sure, this is a good idea. Ikan Kekek (talk) 00:25, 19 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like a good idea. EpicPupper (talk) 21:07, 10 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
No. That guy pretty much never reverts anything. That referred to someone who was the most active vandal at the time I posted that reply. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:10, 10 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oh I see. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | en.wikipedia) 02:19, 11 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Looking back, Brendan isn't really a vandal, but more a copyright violator. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | en.wikipedia) 02:22, 11 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Nominations

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