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 Request Expired.

VeblenBot[edit]

Operator: CBM (talk · contribs)

Time filed: 12:29, Wednesday March 23, 2011 (UTC)

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic

Programming language(s): Perl

Source code available: Yes, svn on toolserver, [1]. Same code as Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/VeblenBot 4

Function overview: Clean up articles tagged as unreferenced by Erik9bot

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_84#Hiding_Template_Unreferenced_on_Articles

Edit period(s): one time run

Estimated number of pages affected: 12,000

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): N/A

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function details:

See the first post of this VPP thread (title "Discussion") for the full backstory. This task is part of a compromise worked out to handle a lot of articles that were originally tagged by Erik9bot in 2009 (Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Erik9bot 9). There are about 45,000 of these articles; they currently have an invisible "unreferenced" tag on them. For the 12,000 shortest ones, which are all under 350 bytes of actual text, the tags from Erik9bot tagging will be removed (that's this task). For the rest, the "unreferenced" tag will be made visible. This compromise as worked out on the village pump and Template talk:unreferenced. Right now the Erik9bot articles are in a sort of limbo because they are tagged differently than any other articles (using a special "auto" parameter). The goal in the end is to get everything back to the status quo; then future improvement efforts and bot tasks can use that as a starting point.

Discussion[edit]

Oppose unless bot function is modified Removing ((Unreferenced)) (or a similar category) from articles which have zero references is not helpful. Just because the articles are very short doesn't exempt them from the requirements of WP:V. Also, just because they are already marked as stubs doesn't exempt them either, nor does a ((Stub)) tag serve as a replacement for an ((Unreferenced)) tag. This bot would be more helpful if it treated each article equally. It should check each article for the appearance of references (i.e. check for <ref> tags and/or external links), and if it doesn't appear that there are references, then it should remove the hidden category and add ((Unreferenced)) to the top. If it finds external links, then perhaps it should add ((No footnotes)). If it finds <ref> tags, then it should just remove the hidden category and do nothing else. There should be no preferential treatment based on article size. —SW— yak 00:05, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That is certainly an opinion, but at the same time there have been objections since Erik9bot originally ran to the idea of a but putting the unreferenced tag automatically onto very short articles. That's why Erik9bot didn't do it, and why the tags are not shown at the moment. To a large extent the "stub" tag does indicate to the reader that the article needs significant improvement; and for very short articles the length itslef makes it clear that the article is incomplete.
However, getting past that, this bot job is a compromise to deal with the "auto" parameter from the unreferenced tag. The underlying problem was the original Erik9bot job. There is some advantage in getting back to the normal status quo, so that we can move forward from there. There isn't agreement to just undo all of Erik9bots edits, nor to make the template visible on every article that Erik9bot edited. A compromise lets us move forward.
I'd recommend also posting your concerns to the village pump thread, linked above. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:44, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Whatever ends up happening, it should happen consistently regardless of article length. An unreferenced article is an unreferenced article, whether it's 10 words or 10,000. Meeting WP:V is not a "cleanup" task, it is a requirement. Either the unref-Erikbot categories should be removed from all articles, or the ((Unreferenced)) template should replace it in all articles (assuming they are checked for references first). There's no reason that the length of the article should enter into this discussion. —SW— express 05:38, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Adding ((unreferenced)) to stub length articles does not have currently have community consensus (Bot or Human). In short the argument is that the ((stub)) indicates that the article is a work in progress and adding anything other then ((fact)) is not helpful. No one is arguing that short articles are exempt from WP:V, only that having bot placed ((unreferenced)) on these short articles does not have consensus. Consensus at the Pump is to leave the template on long articles and remove from short articles. Carl is attempting to remove templates that do not have consensus to be added by bot (but were), where consensus is clear that hiding is not appropriate. SW's argument that removing the tags would be inconsistent is not accurate as there are huge volumes of stubs that are unreferenced and do not have ((unreferenced)) (hidden or not) on them. To create the consistency SW is asking for would require a new task to added the template across all articles on Wikipedia that are not referenced. I would be happy to champion that suggestion, but it is a topic out of scope to the current discussion. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 10:50, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Jeepday, I think you are mistaken when you state "Adding ((unreferenced)) to stub length articles does not have currently have community consensus (Bot or Human)." The latest formal consensus check on this was Template talk:Unreferenced/Archive 11#RFC: should this tag be allowed on stubs?, which ended with the conclusion: "The result of the proposal was a consensus for having no restrictions on the use of this template on stubs." The continued opposition of CBM e.a. doesn't mean that that consensus is no longer valid. While there may be no consensus to have the tag added by bots, there is a clear consensus that the tag itself is perfectly acceptable on stubs, since "stub" and "unreferenced" have clearly different meanings. Fram (talk) 11:18, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The issue here is not unreferenced tags on stubs in general; it's about the 45,000 articles that have an invisible "unreferenced" tag due to Erik9bot. The reason that the tag is invisible is that, on very short articles, many editors find the visual appearance of the template is out of place. Indeed, on the village pump thread here, editors again suggested removing the template from stubs. But other editors wish that the templates on those articles were visible, instead of being hidden. The idea of this compromise is not to remove all the hidden templates. The idea is to remove them only from the very shortest articles, and then make them visible on all the rest. Then people could continue manually tagging articles as unreferenced like they normally do. In other words, the idea is to clean up after Erik9bot once and for all, to get rid of Category:Articles automatically tagged as unreferenced. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:32, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I know what the issue is, I responded to an incorrect statement by Jeepday (note the (Bot or Human) at the end of his statement: the "human" bit is incorrect). Fram (talk) 11:39, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I see. I don't know whether you object to the bot request, or if there are any questions about the proposed job I can clarify. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:43, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I have no objection to the bot request, as long as it (or the VPP discussion) isn't used as an excuse to remove manually added unref tags as well. I notice from your previous reply that you have no intention of doing this, but I was afraid that JeepDay's post might give the impression to others that such removal would be acceptable. Apart from that, I have no real problems with the compromise, and even less with a bot to act upon it. Fram (talk) 11:50, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just to state it in writing: this job will not affect any articles that are not in Category:Articles automatically tagged as unreferenced and will be a one time only job. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:56, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the only thing the bot will be doing is deleting Category:Articles automatically tagged as unreferenced, thus removing the ability for anyone to track 12,000 unreferenced articles. How can that possibly be perceived as a benefit? Perhaps you should bring this category to WP:CFD first before this bot is run, since the category will be empty when you're done with it. —SW— yak 15:40, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The bot job will not affect the majority of articles in the category - only about 12,000 out of 45,000. On the other hand, I created the category :) so I can say it was intended to be temporary in the first place. It's just a tracking category for the "auto" parameter to the unreferenced template. The deeper question is what to do with that parameter; it has been discussed at length at Template talk:unreferenced and at the village pump discussion linked above. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:15, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This is the first step towards deleting the category, even if this bot won't carry out the next step. A CfD should happen before either step commences, even if you created the category. Also, I still haven't heard a reason why it is a benefit to remove the ability for anyone to track 12,000 unreferenced articles. —SW— yak 16:25, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The point is that these articles were all tagged by a bot originally, which left us in this strange situation where we have an extra parameter to the unreferenced template to make the templates invisible. The goal of the bot job is to implement a compromise that was worked out to handle this particular set of articles. It's not as if these articles become impossible to track afterwards. For example, they are all still marked as stubs and are extremely short, a combination that can be searched for in the database. It's true that they won't have the template any more, and that's the point - there's no consensus for a bot to have added the tag to thousands of articles in the first place, and right now we are left with that situation to resolve. This BRFA isn't really the place to revisit all the arguments about the compromise; I have summarized them, and we can discuss them more at Template talk:Unreferenced. The CFD issue seems irrelevant to me; we don't make CFDs when we delete empty tracking categories, we just delete them. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:49, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Wait a minute I thought this BRFA was to remove the extra parameter from teh articles that were long enough (not so stubby) so that the template was visible for them while leaving it invisible to the others. Now you are saying that its going to remove the template and I don't believe that is what the discussion concluded. --Kumioko (talk) 20:08, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
For the articles that are long enough, this job will do nothing, but we can make the template visible by editing the template or have another bot job remove the "auto" parameters. This job only affects the short articles. See the last comment, by Jeepdaysock, in the village pump thread. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:16, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The only perceived benefit I can see is that the bot will "tidy things up" and remove articles from a category which is causing them no harm and is completely invisible to the reader. The downside is that we will no longer be able to track these 12,000 articles by their unreferenced status. Wouldn't a better solution be to simply change the ((Unreferenced)) template such that the "auto" parameter keeps the tag invisible, but adds the article to the normal category for unreferenced articles? This doesn't seem like a well thought-out task, and there are a lot of questions regarding how this bot will indiscriminately hack away at these thousands of articles: How was the threshold of 350 bytes chosen? How is that reconciled against WP:CL-RULE? Will the bot actually look for ((Stub)) templates or go by article size alone? Do infoboxes, categories, and other templates factor into the 350 bytes, or is it prose alone?
The overall problem I have with this task is that, despite being very short, these articles are unreferenced and so if we have an opportunity to continue tracking them as unreferenced articles, then we should find a way to preserve that tracking information rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water. —SW— converse 17:10, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It appears you have not read the village pump thread that was linked [2], in which this was discussed at length. All 45,000 of these articles are tagged as stubs (the ones that weren't already had the parameter removed). That's part of the difficulty. The bot is looking at prose only, not templates, categories, or interwiki links. The 350-byte threshold was chosen to be at about the 25th percentile of the distribution of prose sizes for the 45,000 articles. This is because the objections have always been to having the template on very short stubs in particular. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:44, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I browsed through it but didn't read the whole thing. It seemed like consensus was not particularly strong. Only 6 editors contributed to the discussion, and at least 2-3 of them were not particularly comfortable with the idea. I understand that Erik9bot left a mess behind which requires some degree of cleanup, but it appears that no thought has been put into how to perform that cleanup without losing the ability to track 12,000+ unreferenced articles. The fact that they are very short stubs and are probably tagged as such isn't a substitute. There are plenty of sourced microstubs out there. Very short article ≠ Unreferenced article. Surely, if we put our minds to it, there would be some way of retaining the ability to track these articles as unreferenced articles, while cleaning up after Erik9bot. —SW— gab 17:59, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
2-3 editors there also suggested just removing the tag from all articles marked as stubs. This proposal is very intentionally a compromise between two extremes. It's hard to have a more public location than the village pump to discuss these things. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:17, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There is this village pump thread (archived) [3]. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:55, 23 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note that the objections above are policy related and placed here while the debate was open at the pump, but the authors chose not to participate in the larger discussion at the pump. Consensus for the change as requested by Carl was reached in the open form at the pump, with myself and Carl championing the opposing perspectives. Carl's request will help to close the book on a series of good faith changes that went a little off track, through no fault of any current active volunteers on the project. I continue to strongly support this bot request. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:07, 25 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just because a few of us missed the VP discussion doesn't invalidate our concerns. Everyone acknowledges that something must be done, but the current solution is not good enough. There is a lot of room for improvement, and more thought should be put into this before it's too late. —SW— speak 14:13, 25 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Missed? "I'd recommend also posting your concerns to the village pump thread, linked above." March 24 edits here, March 28 archive from Pump. Not sure what thought is required "before it's too late"? Removing some tags from some articles? If Carl takes them off, so what, put them back on. I know I will be put some back on after he takes them off. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 15:12, 25 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The last comment at the VP discussion was on March 22. My first comment here was on March 24. Either way, my point is that the time and location of my comments doesn't invalidate them. This bot proposal, in its current form, will cause approximately 12,000 unreferenced articles to fall off the map. We have good information that the articles are unreferenced, and we're throwing it away for no good reason. The reason I say "before it's too late" is because after this bot task is completed, it will be impractical to reverse it unless you want to go around reverting 12,000 edits. There is a better solution out there to the perceived problem, you just haven't thought hard enough to find it yet. I made some suggestions above, and if you don't like them, that's fine. I'd support any solution to the problem which doesn't result in the ((unreferenced)) tag being removed from 12,000 unreferenced articles. —SW— verbalize 16:13, 25 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I personally believe that every unreferenced article should be tagged as unreferenced. I also think the majority of Wikipedians who have a position on the subject would concur. That being said the reason these tags should be removed is that got on these article through a side door of consensus. It is not that they are tagged inappropriately or that the articles should or should not be tagged. it is that they way they were tagged is counter to the appropriate process to add the tag. It is my intent to bring forward a proposal to systematically tag articles that are unreferenced. But before that can happen this mess needs to get cleaned up. If community consensus can be shown to tag unreferenced stubs by bot, then these 12,000 articles and thousands more will get tagged. If not they will stay untagged. In any case removing the tags removes a significant sidebar conversation that will only detract for further conversations on the topic. I would ask that bot request be considered as a matter of clean up not as a matter of policy. Let the clean-up occur so that maters of policy can be discussed with a wider audience. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:08, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That is silly. Ok, so someone inappropriately used an unapproved bot to make legitimate edits. What's done is done. There's no use in undoing the edits just because they weren't originally done by the book. If we know the articles are unreferenced, then there will never be any use in untagging them as such. If some editors are really holding up progress on other issues because of this (which I doubt), then I would tell them that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. —SW— confabulate 14:11, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If there are really larger discussions happening about the systematic tagging of unreferenced articles, then the fate of these articles should be included in those discussions. We shouldn't just wipe them off the map and then hope that the discussions about systematic tagging go in the direction we want them to. If the discussions end up with a consensus that all unreferenced articles except those under 350 bytes in length should be systematically tagged, then the articles in question here should have their tags removed. If the discussions end up with a consensus that all unreferenced articles, no matter their size, should be systematically tagged, then these articles should have their category link converted to an unreferenced tag. Wiping these articles off the map before these discussions happen will only serve to make them much harder to find and identify as unreferenced later on down the line. There is no benefit to deleting the good information we have about these articles. —SW— comment 14:47, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Does anyone see a likely resolution of this in the near future or should I just expire this request? MBisanz talk 16:57, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think the request is on hold for a while. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:44, 28 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's been over three months since this request was filed. Time to expire it I think. A new one can always be started later. NW (Talk) 04:40, 4 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Request Expired. No activity and does not appear to be going anywhere for now. No prejudice to re-starting this as a new BRFA. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 08:40, 4 July 2011 (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.
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