Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DavidLeighEllisBot

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was

Withdrawn by operator.

DavidLeighEllisBot[edit]

Operator: DavidLeighEllis (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 21:45, Sunday August 11, 2013 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): python pywikipediabot replace.py

Source code available: Yes

Function overview: Places Category:Articles which contain graphical timelines in articles for which this category is appropriate.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Requested by another editor at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks#Finding_all_graphical_timelines.

Edit period(s): When manually started by operator

Estimated number of pages affected: 1000

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): No

Function details: For all mainspace pages whose rendered text matches searches for "this is the timeline" or "this is a timeline", both queries being supplied without quotation marks to the API, if the wikitext of a page contains the substring "<timeline>" and does not contain Category:Graphical timelines, Category:graphical timelines, Category:Articles which contain graphical timelines, or Category:articles which contain graphical timelines, then add Category:Articles which contain graphical timelines to the end of the wikitext. See example (manually confirmed) edits: [1] [2] [3] [4].

Discussion[edit]

Hmm. I think we might need to place these in a subcategory, eg Category:Articles which contain graphical timelines, if they're going to be automatically added. The long-standing content in Category:Graphical timelines, was generally of the nature where the bulk of the content is in the purely graphical format, eg. List of classical music composers by era and Timeline of United States at war and Timeline of Prime Ministers of Canada.

When I asked for a list to be generated, I was planning to go through them manually, and evaluate whether they belonged within the category or not, and also try to get a general lay-of-the-land regarding how prolifically the extension is used, to determine next-steps.

(Because: The navigational page, List of timelines, is also probably needing a drastic update. Also all the articles need to be placed within the topically appropriate subcategory in Category:Timelines)

However, checking further, these appear to be the only other articles that are primarily graphical (plus the 3 above): Timeline of Philippine elections, Timeline of aviation, Timeline of political parties in the United Kingdom, UK Prime Ministers timeline, List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom (graphical), Graphical list of chief ministerial tenures and important events of Tamil Nadu, Timeline of three longest supported deck arch bridge spans, Timeline of three longest spans, Timeline of three tallest structures in the world, Timeline of Valdivian history, Graphical timeline of the Stelliferous Era, Graphical timeline of the Big Bang, Graphical timeline of the universe, Graphical timeline from Big Bang to Heat Death (16 altogether). Therefor the rest of the articles that are already in the category, might need to be further split or subcategorised, or otherwise thought about (which I shall do for a few days, now). –Quiddity (talk) 02:45, 12 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm amending the function descriptions per the above. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 15:58, 12 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Support, per amended descriptions. (Sorry for the extensive list above, I was kind of making a notes-to-self section, but thought it useful to share). –Quiddity (talk) 18:55, 12 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Why are you adding the category at the end of the text instead of sorted with the rest of the categories? And why are you checking if the page belongs to a category by searching the text instead of actual mediawiki request? Granted, there would probably not even be any false positives for this task, but I have to point this out given categories are sometimes added via transcluded templates? — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 19:59, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

(1) Because I was using the provided replace.py script for the test edits. Is there some graceful way to make replace.py add the category in a sorted manner?

(2) If I am not greatly mistaken, this particular category is never transcluded by templates. Replace.py handles searching the wikitext out of the box, whereas making an api request for the categories would require custom coding.

Issue two might be safely ignored, if we know that the category will always be present in the wikitext. However, I concede that issue one may be a dealbreaker, if unresolved. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 21:15, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Issue 1 is not a huge issue. And we have bots that are casually fixing category sorting. Then again it's discouraged to introduce something by bot other bots need to fix. I don't know the particulars of replace.py, but surely you could search for the last [[Category: occurrence, then add your category after the next newline. From there sorting is just going through all the found category names and placing yours where appropriate. Custom code is always more work. For example, I was sure AWB handles this plus the correct layout/formatting. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 21:29, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm running GNU/Linux only at the moment, so I can't use AWB. But plenty of editors do have access to AWB. Would anyone like to takeover this task? DavidLeighEllis (talk) 21:34, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Incidentally, this, and any other bots on Wikipedia, may be affected by an issue I've raised at meta. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 22:07, 20 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Alternatively, if no one else wants this task, I am happy to run it without category sorting. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 22:42, 21 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

{{BAGAssistanceNeeded}} DavidLeighEllis (talk) 23:41, 26 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 09:02, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The trial has been run. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 17:52, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The text insert location like here or here is what I feel uncomfortable with approving. 3/50 is 6% and that's a pretty simple article set (most are hurricane seasons). 60 layout errors for 1k pages is a bit too much for me, especially since categories aren't sorted either. I'm afraid pywiki uses Python, which is a full programming language and I see no reason to not do this properly. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 18:13, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your assistance with this request. Please consider it withdrawn; I will be performing the task without full automation. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 20:17, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Withdrawn by operator. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 20:46, 27 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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