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 Approved.

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

Time filed: 19:22, Monday November 26, 2012 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): Python (using the pywikipediabot rewrite framework)

Source code available: source code on bitbucket (specifically the files opentasks.py and opentask-short.py)

Function overview: Update task templates at regular intervals

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): Periodically, probably once every hour

Estimated number of pages affected: A handful

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): No

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

Function details: The bot runs on the Toolserver, using its databases to sample a random number of articles from categories associated with specific article tasks (e.g. Category:All articles that may contain original research). In addition to random selection it might apply other criteria, e.g. high popularity or below a certain size, by sampling a larger number of articles than needed and picking specific ones from that set. Once a set of articles is selected it updates the affected page by substituting content, often span elements with specific IDs.

Discussion[edit]

SuggestBot already has approval to update Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask, see BRFA SuggestBot 7. This BRFA is on purpose a little more general, partly because we also want to update Template:Opentask-short as part of the Onboarding new Wikipedians project, and partly because I suspect there might be some other task template created in the future (e.g. it's not unlikely that a future WMF project or a WikiProject might want one), which is why I have not specified exactly which one in order to not have to submit a BRFA every time.

The described functionality is the same as for updating the Community Portal's list of open tasks, except that I also mention the possibility of additional selection criteria, something which was also briefly mentioned in BRFA SuggestBot 7|SuggestBot's Community Portal/Opentask BRFA but has now been implemented. Once I have put my code through a couple of days of testing I'll update the link to the source code.

Also, the bot isn't exclusion compliant because these tasks shouldn't have a ((nobots)) template anyway. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:22, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Just want to chime in and say that this is essential for a test the experiments team at the WMF is running in collaboration with Nettrom. We're going to try delivering these open tasks to brand new users, and attempt to increase the number of newly-registered people who ever edit, which is currently at the rather dismal rate of only 30%. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:30, 26 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Approved for trial (50 edits or 5 days). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. MBisanz ^talk 02:26, 27 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the speedy trial approval. I was hoping to get the trial started late last week, but ran into a speed bump, there's some efficiency improvements needed that take longer than I expected. Should get this moving some time in the coming days, though, will update again when it happens. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 15:51, 3 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've updated the link to the source code on Bitbucket now that the code is ready for the trial, which will start in about half an hour. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:35, 6 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete.

I've stopped the cronjobs running this script as the five days are up. The bot's edits to Template:Opentask-short are the nine most recent edits in the page's revision history. Due to the way we selected articles combined with the category it pulls articles from (Category:All articles needing copy edit) being fairly stable, the page was mostly untouched, although the script to update it ran once every hour. As far as I can tell from the bot's logs the were no issues. Let me know if there's anything. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:20, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Nice work Nettrom. :) This was all the expected behavior of the bot, which as you can tell, is not substantially different from its edits to Template:Opentask as far as the wiki is concerned. In related news: we're hoping to deploy the test where new editors will see this task list on Thursday (December 13th), so if we could get an okay from BAG by then it would be stellar. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:18, 11 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. MBisanz ^talk 06:24, 12 December 2012 (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.