Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Dev/Archive 4

Clutter vs. accommodation[edit]

Not being a professional developer myself, I can't really say for certain, but as a user of various pieces of software it seems that programmers are in a constant battle between accomodating the minority, whilst leaving the interface simple enough for the majority.

Personally, I think that AWB should accommodate as much of the minority as possible, given the usefulness of AWB at speedying up the sort of WikiGnome edits which are going to take longer and longer as wiki projects expand. Thusly, some thought must be given to how best to house this extra power.

In recent months, a whole host of really useful functionality has been added to AWB by more competent developers than me. These come with the neccessity of opt-outs. Additionally, it is now possible to implement (with little difficulty) a whole host of page selection ("skip") options. Today's Signpost reports that "New parameters (size, wordcount, timestamp, snippet) have been added to list=search in ApiQuerySearch.php", for example. The hard part will no doubt be juggling the want of more customisation with a simple interface that is easy to use. Some thoughts:

I have never used the "General fixes skip options" button (is that skip genfixes, or skip the page, btw?); something similar might be useful for re-housing some of the more rarely used / yet-to-be-included skip options. Thus the tab would be clutter-free, but the options still available to those interested. Seems sensible?

Would it possible to integrate an "Actions" button for the edit area which brought up the same menu as you get by right clicking? There are so many useful options on there that I hope they aren't getting overlooked by people who never RTFM or, in fact, right click.

I, personally, don't mind having the options menu. It seems to me to be a useful compromise, but I can see that its useful is inversely proportional to its length. For example, it's difficult to explain what all the options do without resorting to the AWB manual. For some issues, it may be difficult to have a simple on/off switch. It might be in AWB's long term interests to move to a Tools > Options dialog, I just don't know. A big slider with "All fixes (MOS)" to "NO automatic fixes" (internet options style) could be useful in this respect.

An interesting can of worms, and you are welcome to invoke "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but if the function-adding continues, it might be useful to give some consideration to interface now, especially given the new 5 release in the pipeline. - Jarry1250 ^{[ In the UK? Sign the petition! ]} 10:28, 4 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe should try and do some stuff with this might help ;) —Ree dy 22:21, 23 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Post v5/TODO[edit]

Can we nuke the WebBrowser Branch?
Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests#Submit_Usage_Stats_asynchronously
Look for any directory joining fun and games. Use the inbuilt .NET stuff
- rev 6001

—Ree dy 07:43, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Investigate whether we can provide a Wine build with non-working features removed. Rjwilmsi 23:12, 12 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Threading such that the GUI doesn't hang while genfixes are running. Rjwilmsi 23:01, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Refactor a lot of the code behind Main.cs into other classes - Reusable code shouldn't be there!!
- Highlighting and such can probably become part of the ArticleTextBox or similar.

—Ree dy 22:36, 16 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Localisation/Internationalisation of GUI
More per-project settings/customisations (in a less hacky way!)

—Ree dy 00:58, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

rev 6107 - To review —Ree dy 15:57, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Login code[edit]

This may not be the right place to ask, but I'll try...

Could someone please put up some very simple c.net or vb.net code that shows how to login using the mediawiki api. Any help is appreciated.Smallman12q (talk) 01:58, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Add a reference to the WikiFunctions project or DLL. Then

using WikiFunctions.API;

class Program
{
	static void Main(string[] args)
	{
		ApiEdit editor = new ApiEdit("http://en.wikipedia.org/w/");

		try
		{
			editor.Login("Username", "Password");
			Console.WriteLine(" succeeded");
		}
		catch (LoginException)
		{
			Console.WriteLine(" failed");
		}
	}
}

—Ree dy 12:19, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! My other question is more of a request. Could you offer a downloadable source package rather than forcing everyone to use svn...it would be much easier to simply download a zipped package, unzip it, and then open the solution rather than browsing the various trunks of the svn.Smallman12q (talk) 22:51, 19 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can just reference a built version of WikiFunctions.dll if you want. —Ree dy 01:00, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Or just checkout WikiFunctions —Ree dy 13:04, 23 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

AWB's future & Localisation[edit]

I think we all agree that AWB of the future must be based on 2 things: Customisation and Localisation.

Customisation: Editors are flexible in defining the order of the things done choosing from a list of available functions. They can choose whether to skip if one or more functions is called or not called etc.
Localisation: AWB is adjusted to each project's preferences.

For the latter it's obvious that we can't keep up with all the changes by adding language conditions in the code. I think we have to formulate the following strategy:

We create basic functions that are Regex-free
We create settings-like files that load the rest. Each project can create their own.

In this way we don't have to change the code each time a new redirect is crated/deleted for a function. We have a more stable code that is updates only by updating regexes to a settings-like file, a way similar to the way we load the IW-order. The only difference is that the settings file enables us not to require Internet access to load the file. We can of course have a database with settings files for the various projects. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:46, 8 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with that. That way devs are more free to "hard work", and small changes are mantained by local comunities, like the typos project. Alchimista ^{talk with me} 14:55, 23 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Logo[edit]

Does AWB have a logo? I want to put a link up from my website. --kingboyk (talk) 10:38, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Google Search[edit]

TODO for me - [1]

Should be better than screenscraping...

—Ree dy 14:04, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Would be great if we could also support the language translation stuff, possible bot operation to provide translations of foreign-language citations. Rjwilmsi 15:01, 13 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

DuplicateUnnamedReferences: clean-up or style change?[edit]

Ongoing discussion here. Should consensus regard it as a "style change", the feature will have to be removed because WP:CITEHOW disallows changes of an "established" citation style. —bender235 (talk) 02:38, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CSVLoader plugin[edit]

Hello Devs, I had written a CSVLoader plugin for AWB that allows users to add/update articles using CSV data files. It is currently being hosted separately on the Google-code site. It has been operational since 2008. It has been used on English Wikipedia, Tamil Wiktionary and Commons so far. I would like to know if it is possible to add the plugin to the AWB source. It will get greater visibility and would help me with debugging as well. The plugin source is available here. Thanks. — Ganeshk (talk) 01:28, 24 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

meta:Talk:Interwiki sorting order#Proposal: Storing interwiki sorting at local system message[edit]

I have made a proposal for creating a central place for computer readable messages containing the interwiki sort order. At the moment each framework uses it own config file which has to be updated manually after changes to the list of wikis. Please respond to it on metawiki. Merl issimo 17:18, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

To-do[edit]

Fix the symmetric difference in Filter. Use the following instead: Merge both lists, remove duplicates.
Reduce the skip condition from any character in the Unicode Private Use Area to those where the problem really is.
Wikipedia:AWB/B#407_error
Done Wikipedia:AWB/B#.22.24wgGroupPermissions.5B.27.2A.27.5D.5B.27read.27.5D_.3D_false.3B.22_makes_AWB_on_custom_sites_impossible_to_use

-- Magioladitis (talk) 11:47, 4 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Please update the function Enable Regex TypoFix to allow it to use the local projects page, for example, v:fr:Wikiversité:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos instead of w:fr:Wikipédia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos when it exists. JackPotte (talk) 12:40, 21 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Also, something nice would be to allow the downloaded Enable Regex TypoFix rules to be converted into AWB rules, exportable in settings.xml. JackPotte (talk) 11:12, 22 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

And one dedicated the Wikisource OCR frequent mistakes. JackPotte (talk) 14:16, 1 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Possible Mass Deletion module?[edit]

Hello! I'm a user over at Wikia and I'm on a answers wiki (Basically a wiki solely for Q & A type stuff about the topic) and its very vandalized/spammed/etc with counterproductive answers/questions. I'm not really good with coding or anything like that; But I was wondering if its possible to make a module to mass delete questions if triggered by the find/replace regex. I look forward to any insight ΚΛΤΛΝΛGØD^Τλłκ 10:07, 10 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

5.4.0.0[edit]

More than a year passed since 5.3.1 was released, more than 100 bugs were fixed, so now it's time to release. We stop working on new features in 24h from now, we can spend 1 or 2 days more for bug fixing and that's it. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:53, 7 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Reedy started CR. Before releasing we need to wait for the outcome of the discussions on Stubs (most probably we should not tag "List of..." and "Lists of..." as stubs) and on Wikify (most probably we move the criteria of wikify to deadend and we won't tag for wikify anymore). -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:39, 17 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done Discussion on stubs ended and we implemented the requested change. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:32, 21 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion on wikify ended. Result was delete existing template and replace it with a dab page. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:11, 26 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Last thing to be done: Move code for wikify tag/untag to tag/untag deadend. There is a question of what to do with non-en projects! -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:06, 30 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

ar:نقاش_المستخدم:Magioladitis#AWB_rev8277 Ar.wiki follows our current settings. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:07, 31 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

5.5.0.0[edit]

Here's the plan for the new release:

Rename all instances of wikify to underlinked to enwiki Done
Speedup improvements Done
Check whether we can easily simplify KingbotK's plugin code.

The first change is critical and somehow forces us to make a new release. I don't know if you could implement Wikipedia:AWB/FR#Enhanced_Autotagging to save us from these problems in the future. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:09, 23 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

We just released today.

Updated current version.
Updated enabled versions on checkpage.
Updated history page.
Updated interwiki pages. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:00, 22 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions for Bugs and Feature request pages[edit]

Hi everyone! Based on the suggestions Rjwilmsi posted on my talk page, I thought I'd continue the conversation here.

Bugs[edit]

For bug reports pre 5.5.0.0, should we ask people to report if they're still having the problem? If so, make sure they document how to reproduce the issue. If they don't have the problem or don't respond, should we archive the bug report?

Feature requests[edit]

Should we add a field in Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests/Feature request template that specifically prompts the requestor to provide a link to the guideline/documentation/conversation that supports the request they're making? Also, could ~~~~ be added to the template?

Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 00:55, 2 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Should add to the high/medium/low... never. First pass should be what will never happen, such as AWB authenticating against an LDAP server. Bgwhite (talk) 05:37, 2 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Eliminate the clutter on the Bugs/Feature request pages[edit]

I wasn't invited but I'll chime in any way. Feel free to discard anything invalid or unwanted but a couple things I notice.

I think we should cull the list of bugs and features and clean it up. There are a lot that have been out there for years. There are a lot that won't happen but there still there. I think we need to just archive them. If we eliminate some of the extra crud it won't be so overwhelming.
After reviewing you can start by archiving the ones I have submitted. Most have been out there for a couple years. If I start using AWB again and it bothers me I will resubmit. No reason to leave them out there since most aren't likely to happen anyway. Kumioko (talk) 18:03, 2 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The list of AWB users need to be cleaned up. There are a lot of users that aren't around anymore. Bots too.

Anyway, just a couple things to think about. Kumioko (talk) 16:42, 2 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Who is this Kumioko? I vaguely remember that name. I see you are new to Wikipedia, so let me tell you about an important rule. Wikipedia is run by bullies and whatever crazy rules they decide goes. Magioladitis is our bully and he said to invite no stinkin' new users. So get lost. (Nice to see you again, but don't say anything to Magioladitis as he will beat me) Bgwhite (talk) 04:48, 3 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lol, yeah I was perfectly fine just doing the occassional edit as an IP but some felt that was socking, or at least that was the excuse they used so here I am again. Kumioko (talk) 15:31, 3 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Update home page[edit]

User:Bgwhite/Sandbox

I'm not to good at paring the bugs/features, so I thought I'd start with this first. Trying to pare down the overly confusing page. The section "Getting the sources", as well as most others in the top menu (Custom modules, plugins, types, etc) will be moved to the new "Documentation" section. Edit the page as you see fit. Is this a good idea? Bgwhite (talk) 00:33, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Deleting bots[edit]

Per Kumioko's suggestion, I was looking at the approved bots that can use AWB. The vast majority haven't edited in years. Of the first 10 checked, only one is active and the other nine haven't edited since atleast 2010. One hasn't edited since 2006. Can I delete bots from the CheckPage that hasn't edited in 2012 or 2013? Bgwhite (talk) 05:52, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You obviously have my support.:-)Kumioko (talk) 13:45, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Non-active bots have been removed from CheckPage. There are 56 active bots. CheckPage previously listed 181. ~20 active bots haven't edited in the past six months. Please, oh please, I hope I didn't remove an active bot. Bgwhite (talk) 01:43, 6 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it's appropriate to change permissions like that without even noticing the users (i.e. bot ops) or even linking to the thread where the removal was discussed. That only causes confusion when one of these users tries to use the bot (as just happened to me), and AWB claims the bot isn't authorized. Besides, it is especially unjustified not to warn the operators if they themselves are still editing regularly. In that light, and since the removal was just a bureaucratic / cleanup procedure, I'm re-adding my bot, which I will put to use right away. Next time something like this is done, please warn the operators, especially if they are still active, or at least link to the discussion thread in the edit summary, which saves a lot of digging through history logs in the future. Cheers, Waldir ^talk 18:38, 26 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Archive ancient bugs and Feature requests[edit]

Inline with the suggestion above about prioritizing changes, I recommend that we start by archiving anything older than 2011. There are a lot out there that are from 2007, 08, 09, 10 and a couple even earlier. I have already archived all my old submissions but didn't want to touch the others. After looking at most of these it appears that most of them that could be done have been. The software has changed so much since some of these bugs and features have been suggested that they are unlikly to continue or have been overcome by events. This will allow the developers to refocus on the current, important issues without having these old and mostly outdated requests cluttering things up and giving the feeling of being overwhelming. Then we can go through and prioritize what's left. Kumioko (talk) 13:45, 5 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]