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.
I've been thinking of MZ's comment that subpages made sense in 2010, but not 2022. What if AnomieBOT created JSON pages, with one per month or even year, and have the TFA titles keyed by YYYY-MM-DD date or similar. I think that would avoid any concerns about "complicated parsing" in the Lua side since JSON is pretty safe and fast, and still be easily machine readable for TFA Protector Bot and other tools. And hopefully the reduction in pages would annoy less people (and you can't categorize JSON pages...). Legoktm (talk) 07:25, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
If it's a single page name and date, I think yearly would be more than sufficient. I do agree this is probably a good way to split this metaphorical baby. I think there are dozens of cases where we've fount that subpages and/or dozens of pages (cite doi and the political name templates, respectively as examples) just don't make sense any more. Primefac (talk) 13:07, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
We could, sure. The JSON for all the existing data not even divided by year would be only 160K (174K with newlines and whitespace). But what all would need updating for the new system? How do we even find out? Anomie⚔15:24, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
I think that's mostly up to you as the bot op. I think it would be sufficient to make announcements on VPT, BON, maybe VPM, with a migration period of a month or two in which both the JSON pages and "legacy" subpages would be supported. And/or spend a few weeks creating TFA title subpages with the contents "TFA title subpages are no longer being used, please see .... instead".
I was slightly alarmed to learn that the "official" Wikipedia iOS app was using TFA title at one point, then it switched to a nodejs service and I didn't bother tracing what that was pulling from...if we go ahead with this I can look deeper into that and run some code searches to surface other potential users. Legoktm (talk) 08:27, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
If it's going to be up to me as the bot operator, I think I'll leave things how they are. Other than some people complaining about uncategorized/"unused" templates, there haven't been any problems with the current setup. Maybe I'll add a JSON version alongside it without deprecating the old system. Anomie⚔12:09, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
@Primefac and Legoktm: I made User:AnomieBOT II/TFA title.json to hold the JSON, but the bot can't actually edit it thanks to lacking an appropriate OAuth grant. It should be bot-editable once it gets moved out of userspace, but that will need a supplemental BRFA. Any comments on the format before I do that? One item of note, I took into account the cases mentioned at Wikipedia:Today's featured article oddities where a few times there has been more than one FA which the single-page system can't handle. Anomie⚔14:08, 20 December 2022 (UTC)
It seems to me like most of those outliers were manually modified. Template:TFA title/April 12, 2014 doesn't exist, yet there were still two pages that appeared on the day's TFA page. On the other hand, it looks like that was the only time that was done, and I can't figure out how they modified the values for the other dates given. Primefac (talk) 12:56, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
None of the TFA title subpages I checked had been manually modified, the bot just picked up the first one in the list and never noticed the rest. Back then the bot's logic was to find the first bolded link in the blurb, whatever that was. But what do you think, should I have the bot start maintaining a JSON page with that format too? Anomie⚔14:00, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
Nice! My only suggestion would be to consider wrapping the items in a top-level key, so we could do something like:
{"help":"This page is maintained by AnomieBOT, see [[...]] for more details.","titles":[...]}
Having arrays for the multi-article TFAs is a nice touch.
The oddities page is interesting, I hadn't come across it before. Seems like TFA Protector Bot never protected the new TFA on Feb 14, 2021. Will have to look into that... Legoktm (talk) 03:03, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
Hi, I'm asking you a favor. Since it's impossible for us to change it, can I ask you please to remove "(1994)" from the Italian wikidata of DreamWorks? Just because the other Italian articles about important studios don't have the year of foundation in their wikidata Roby Markz (talk) 23:32, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
You seem to be lost. This page is the talk page for a bot that runs on the English Wikipedia. You probably want to be asking this somewhere of a human editor on Wikidata. Anomie⚔14:23, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
I am not the bot operator, but "please fix every possible typo that someone could make when naming a reference" is likely not something that Anomie is interested in fixing; for every misspelled variant there will likely be a dozen others, and it is easier to just default to what is definitely going to work. I could be wrong, but don't get your hopes up. Primefac (talk) 12:15, 27 December 2022 (UTC)(talk page stalker)
You're not wrong. If someone provides evidence that it's a common enough typo I'll consider it, but I'm not going to chase every typo one person makes once. Anomie⚔13:37, 27 December 2022 (UTC)
TFATitleSubpageCreator: Trial complete!
This task was in trial until 2022-12-30 18:34:36 (UTC), which has now passed. Please stop the task and report the completion of the trial at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT II 4. Thanks. When you have fixed this issue, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. I will repost the notice if the page is still broken or is re-broken. Thanks! AnomieBOT II⚡23:00, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
Removing template
Hello. I noticed you added the "update" template in May 2017. I have been updating the article and want to check if it is still relevant to keep the banner in this article— Genocide of Yazidis by the Islamic State. I also started a discussion in the articles talkpage. Could. you please take a look? Petra0922 (talk) 01:02, 31 December 2022 (UTC)
These Signpost redirects have no incoming links, and result in various scripts/analytics not working correctly; can they be added to a whitelist (or a "stay-red list", as it were) for the auto-create task? jp×g22:05, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
PS. Is it possible to just make a blanket exemption to pages in Signpost space for this task? jp×g22:06, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
It does indeed use the allpages endpoint; while I could filter redirects from that, it seems much simpler to simply avoid them altogether. They don't seem necessary to me: as far as I can tell, nobody ever types in the titles of Signpost articles directly. Indeed, pageviews for these redirects are extremely low (i.e. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-08-01/Election guide/Candidate Op-Ed - Mike Peel had 12 pageviews the week of publication, probably because it was linked to by accident in a draft version of an article. Furthermore, there aren't many redirects in Signpost article space; to be more precise, there are none, since I cleaned them up yesterday (there were about 150 of them, created incidentally by renamings and typos over the course of 20 years of publication). I am personally averse to the idea of all scripts having to include weird edge-case carveouts for 11 of of 8,000-some pages, although I admit this is my preference rather than an objective fact. Of course, I imagine that you would also prefer to run your bot without weird edge-case carveouts for Signpost pages. At any rate, I have retitled these 11 articles in question to use commas instead of en-dashes to alleviate the issue for now, but would still prefer an exemption for Signpost articles in general. jp×g23:20, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
It seems to me that a script that's supposed to not process redirects skipping all redirects isn't a "weird edge-case carveout". Anomie⚔12:25, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
spreading problems around
In the Anuradha Koirala article, an anonymous user made an edit that injected a bunch of prose into the name of an existing reference. AnomieBOT came along and copied that text into another invocation of the same reference name.
Are AnomieBOT's edits monitored? It seems like they should be, becuase it often makes referencing errors worse. Any human editor would've propertly fixed it, but since the bot quickly buried the issue, the problem was hidden for months. -- Mikeblas (talk) 18:18, 4 December 2022 (UTC)
I'm already doing that job, like most other editors on wikipeida who find themselves cleaning up after the bot. Is there a reason that the bot can't be tested so that it doesn't make disruptive edits? Your tone suggests you believe the bot is beyond question. -- Mikeblas (talk) 17:39, 7 December 2022 (UTC)
If you bring me actual bugs or concrete suggestions for improvement, I'll consider them. If you just whine about every case where the bot doesn't behave perfectly or isn't a human-level AI, I won't have much to say to you. Anomie⚔13:48, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
An actual bug is listed above, and a dozen or two more are at User:Mikeblas/Robots Behaving Badly. And I discovered another one today, which I manually fixed. My suggestion for improvement has also been given before: turn off the robot until its correctness can be verified. Pretending that it's not making mistakes and rudely dismissing people who try to draw your attention to the issues it is causing is no constructive. -- Mikeblas (talk) 19:10, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for helping on recovering the orphan sources. I just want to give you a heads up that per the articles move discussion, i am making major changes to the article, and i will be removing large sets of references. So you may see similar error messages. I appreciate the help. Petra0922 (talk) 23:32, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
OrphanReferenceFixer: Blacklisted orphaned reference in Queens - Fixed
When trying to fix orphaned refs in Queens, MediaWiki's spam blacklist complained about about.com. This probably means someone didn't properly clean up after themselves when blacklisting the link and removing existing uses, but a human needs to double-check it. The attempted changes were:
Rescued "TripSavvy 2012 Jan 2" from rev 1135608602 Removed in revision 1135609016 by Keystone18 (talk • contribs • logs) with comment "fix image and remove about.com citations" (removed 1967/265850 bytes, 1%)
Rescued "TripSavvy-Roleke 2009 Jul 10" from rev 1135608602 Removed in revision 1135609016 by Keystone18 (talk • contribs • logs) with comment "fix image and remove about.com citations" (removed 1967/265850 bytes, 1%)
Rescued "TripSavvy 2006 Jan 4" from rev 1135608602 Removed in revision 1135609016 by Keystone18 (talk • contribs • logs) with comment "fix image and remove about.com citations" (removed 1967/265850 bytes, 1%)
You might also use ((subst:User:Anomie/uw-orphans|1=rm diff|2=fix diff)) to let the remover know, if their edit summary indicates they were specifically removing the blacklisted ref. When you have fixed this issue, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. I will repost the notice if the page is still broken or is re-broken. Thanks! AnomieBOT⚡19:36, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
I made an unrelated edit and was unable to save it because of the existing about.com references already in the article. I then removed these references, which seems to have resolved the issue. Not sure why they were permitted to be added in the first place, however. Keystone18 (talk) 19:45, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Hi @User:Anomie, I'm updating ITN stuff on Urdu Wikipedia and want your bot do some works there? Could you be helpful? For now it would be adding a new date entry at WP:ITN/C and doing archive works the same way it does with ITN/C here. Best, ─ The Aafī(talk)18:59, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
The source code for the bot is available at User:AnomieBOT/source if you want to try to make use of it. I'm not interested in trying to run a bot on a wiki where I'm not at all active and don't even speak the language. Anomie⚔22:45, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks @Anomie for the source. I need help for one thing. I am not a tech guy but want discussions older than 7 days from Urdu ITN to be auto-archived (and both the pages are set completely). What if I set a archive-bot, which specific codes would I need to copy and how would the archiving command be executed? I'd be thankful if you provide me a beginners guidance. ─ The Aafī(talk)18:55, 26 January 2023 (UTC)
Bug with multiple requests per page?
At present I have two requests at Talk:List of programs broadcast by PBS Kids, but only the first one is showing up on the SPERTable. I believe this is a bug with the SPERTable not being able to display more than one request per page, but I'm not 100% certain. If someone more knowledgeable with this stuff than I am could explain the problem and try to fix it, that would be much appreciated. 100.7.44.80 (talk) 23:20, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
It's a limitation of how the whole system is designed. Without the bot parsing every page having a request to check for multiples, which is usually not needed, there's not really any way around it. Anomie⚔12:38, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Unfortunately you used ((cita web)) (intended for use when people are copy-pasting from eswiki or itwiki to translate an article) instead of ((cite web)), which is flagged for automatic bot-substing, and the bot is not any sort of AI to be able to determine that you probably typoed the template name (and saved without previewing) instead. If you think that typo is common, you might go to the template's talk page and suggest it also accept the English parameter names so the bot-substing produces correct results. Anomie⚔14:37, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
FWIW, I wasn't the one who added the ((cita web)) to the article. I just noticed your edit because the article is on my watchlist and thought I would let you know. DH85868993 (talk) 07:12, 29 December 2022 (UTC)
In scanning for bad markup, I came across a similar edit and actually others on other articles as well. The bot doesn't need to be omniscient, but I think it would be worthwhile for it to skip subst:ing this template if "titolo" is missing. Before the bot, it's easy for a human to see the error and change "cita web" to "cite web". The bot subst:ing erases the actual cite info from the article, which makes it hard to know what's going on (at first I was just going to erase these broken refs entirely) because the info needed becomes buried in the edit history. (And any subsequent edits make it challenging to undo the subst.) -- Beland (talk) 17:04, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Anomie, it looks like a lot of these "transclusions" are coming from .js pages, which I suspect the bot isn't able to edit in order to subst. For example, Drmies has User:Drmies/defaultBlockSettings.js "calling" the template, in what I suspect is an easier way to preload various options for blocking. Can/should the bot skip .js pages to avoid this sort of issue? Primefac (talk) 09:18, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Ignore that, there are all of 13 pages that fit that description. I have no idea why it's only deciding to throw a fit now (90% of the uses are from before 2020) but I'll add it to the force and we'll go from there. Primefac (talk) 10:17, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Looks like at least part of the problem is that the bot's records seem to be confused somehow. It thinks it already processed various pages for ((uw-ublock)) pointing to the revision where it processed those pages for ((subst:uw-ublock-nonsense)), so it's not trying to process them again. The count of those, along with script and demo usages, is currently enough to bring the total up to 99, so not surprising that a spate of new taggings would tip it over the edge.I don't have any idea as to how it got confused in that manner. I added a check for one weird possibility, and I also deleted all the records for this task so the bot will re-try substring those transclusions. Anomie⚔13:16, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
Draftifying
Sorry about the notice again. It's not my script and it shows the user it's notifying, so I'll be more cautious. I don't know why it's not getting the page creator at times. I was paying more attention and it seemed to be showing the right user, but I obviously missed the last one. —Ost (talk) 07:14, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
What appears to have happened in both cases is that someone tried to create a cross-wiki redirect, which AnomieBOT III changed to a soft redirect pending a human looking at it to decide whether it should exist at all. The script you use considers the bot as the one that changed it from a "real" (but nonfunctional) redirect into an "article", so that's what it wants to notify. Anomie⚔12:14, 2 February 2023 (UTC)
"O" error
During this edit, the bot erroneously changed "O'Rurke_Korenaga_2015", "O'Callaghan_2021", and "O'Rourke_et_al_2019" reference names to "O", which broke the lookup of those citations. I've since addressed it manually. Praemonitus (talk) 17:59, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
Hmm, I'm surprised MediaWiki accepted those unquoted ref name attributes containing apostrophes, that's not allowed in HTML5. I guess it's the appropriate error recovery behavior though. Anomie⚔18:12, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
Updated the bot to better handle this situation. In the future it should add the quotes to such parameters instead of truncating. Anomie⚔18:26, 4 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello, the maintenance tag dater appears to not be working ... it's last edit is this one. I noticed this because tags weren't dated after recent edits to the Columbian exchange article. If you could look into this, that'd be great. Thanks! Graham8701:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Ah, I'd missed that, I thought there was only 1 redirect. So, I need to repoint 'en-dash' first and 'AnomieBOT-guarded-hyphen' second? I'm not sure RFD is needed, it's pretty clear cut in my mind (also, nothing links to them, so no harm done) Project Osprey (talk) 16:13, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
Category:Articles with disproportional geographic scope nominated for deletion
Note that Category:Articles with disproportional geographic scope and its monthly subcategories have been nominated for deletion here. Posting it here since AnomieBOT creates its monthly subcategories, which would need to be stopped if deleted. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 05:02, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Seems that this task hasn't run since the start of March - the main BRFA page since end of Feb and the BAG status page for about 5 days now. Thanks! Primefac (talk) 11:58, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
AnomieBOT left a "dubious" tag on Pope County Militia War concerning officials "took measures intended to influence the Arkansas governor to declare martial law in the county." I've changed that to "attempted to get the Arkansas governor to declare martial law in the county several times."
Thanks. It makes sense that a bot would NOT make such a subjective change (I think). I don't think it matters. I've made repairs, issues are fixed. Caronde (talk) 18:15, 10 March 2023 (UTC)
Is AnomieBOT chartered to collapse vertical formatting?
Hi,
In this edit , the bot appears to have made a change to cite web, which doesn't appear on the subst list; unless I've missed something, all it did was collapse the (perfectly acceptable) vertical formatting that was in place. Was that an intended effect? Thanks, NapoliRoma (talk) 22:50, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
Ha! Completely missed that. It turns out there was an odd apparent vandalism edit that changed "cite" to "site" a few minutes before the bot edit.
(It'd still be nice if the bot didn't take out vertical formatting, but I assume that's an artifact of the subst-ing process.) Regards, NapoliRoma (talk) 06:05, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
It would happen if you manually did the substing too. AnomieBOT doesn't do anything special there. Anomie⚔12:12, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
Can AnomieBOT ignore all instances of ((pin)) prior to today until the cleanup is finished (Unless it already is)? Prior to today it was a redirect to ((ping)) but after an RFD outcome it now redirects to ((pin section)) which should be substed. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#654522:57, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
Would you mind updating this to change the "browser" bar added to use appropriate HTML rather than the table? I think you could just do it by transcluding ((left)) and ((right)), but if you don't want to use templates, you can steal the implementation from there. Izno (talk) 22:40, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Er, what? I'm not asking as a random bot op (are you trying to say that you're the random bot op?), I'm asking as one of the admins who regularly participates and closes at WP:TFD. I was requesting a same form-fit-function replacement, just not using a table.
Or are you just unsure what that replacement looks like in HTML? I can sketch it out if you prefer.
I'm mostly just confused by your response as the guideline of interest is clear (WP:ACCESS) and a change to support that guideline doesn't need its own separate consensus. It's a clear and obvious improvement to boot. Izno (talk) 05:01, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I'm referring to myself as a random bot op. Why are you so opposed to just starting a discussion about this at WT:TFD? Probably you'll get mostly WP:SILENCE with one or two "sure, good idea" replies, but then if someone complains later I can point them to the discussion there. Anomie⚔12:47, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
Ok. Mostly that seems like unnecessary hassle for the exact same end as you think will occur, especially now that you've pulled the rationale out of me and this could be the discussion pointed to instead. :) But I will go invite users from there to here, so as not to repeat myself. Izno (talk) 20:06, 3 March 2023 (UTC)
This edit makes no sense to me at all, so I've reverted it. Could someone investigate please, just in case there's something that can be adjusted to prevent it happening again. Mitch Ames (talk) 00:23, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
An IP vandalized, changing a template on the page to one that is marked to be bot-substituted. About 16 minutes later AnomieBOT came along and did so. Reverting the bot's edit and the IP's vandalism was the correct thing to do. Anomie⚔02:06, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
That much I deduced already. What I didn't understand was why the bot put a user template onto an article page. But now I see: the original ((Use Australian English)) is an article template but ((Use English)) (redirects to ((Uw-notenglishtalk))) is a user template. I had just incorrectly assumed that Use English was also article-space. (Now that I think about it, Use English makes no sense in articles - all articles here are in English; the point of Use Xxxx English is to define the variant.) Mitch Ames (talk) 02:58, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
Updated the bot to make use of that template. Still wondering why ProveIt is doing semi-automated botting here though. Anomie⚔13:58, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
Near as I can tell, I started making CfD pages around February 2008... if your bot will do it, let me know and I'll stop - Prove It(talk)19:25, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
AnomieBOT will create the day's page at about 23:00 UTC the night before. It has been able to do so since late 2016, although it seems you (and others?) have never forgotten long enough for it to have a chance to do so. Anomie⚔11:31, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
I would prefer to do them further in advance, just in case... Anyway, we've now come to the last of my premade pages, we will find out this evening if it builds the page for May 8th or not. -- Prove It(talk)14:00, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
OrphanReferenceFixer: Blacklisted orphaned reference in Lubbock, Texas - Fixed
When trying to fix orphaned refs in Lubbock, Texas, MediaWiki's spam blacklist complained about city-data.com. This probably means someone didn't properly clean up after themselves when blacklisting the link and removing existing uses, but a human needs to double-check it. The attempted changes were:
Rescued "Lubbock, Texas" from rev 1154261147 Removed in revision 1154262320 by Abductive (talk • contribs • logs) with comment "city-data is blacklisted" (removed 167/104226 bytes, 0%)
You might also use ((subst:User:Anomie/uw-orphans|1=rm diff|2=fix diff)) to let the remover know, if their edit summary indicates they were specifically removing the blacklisted ref. When you have fixed this issue, please change the section title (e.g. append " - Fixed") or remove this section completely. I will repost the notice if the page is still broken or is re-broken. Thanks! AnomieBOT⚡08:48, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
I'll just say that I think it's complete BS that city-data.com is blacklisted. It is a commercial site, true, but is quite useful and reliable (except the forums), and harmless. Abductive (reasoning)09:02, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
More specifically, ((Lien web)) is set up such that ((subst:Lien web)) (with its common parameters) will produce a valid invocation of ((Cite web)). It is also flagged for AnomieBOT to substitute it if someone does not do so themself. Anomie⚔11:54, 14 May 2023 (UTC)
Running TagDater on non-article pages
I was unable to find a discussion of this anywhere, but it appears that TagDater is only being run on pages in the article namespace. Unfortunately, this leads to templates, categories, etc getting stuck undated (eg the root Category:Uncategorized pages category is almost all templates).
How hard would it be to get Anomie to run on pages in other namespaces (specifically I would be interested in seeing the uncategorized templates sorted)? Thanks, GiovanniSidwell (talk) 18:26, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
The main thing is that AnomieBOT's approval is for dating tags in articles (and templates transcluded in articles), not for pages in other namespaces. Additional approval would be needed, and I wonder whether there's really enough of a call for it. Looking at Category:Uncategorized pages specifically, the category and the relevant template both indicate that they're supposed to be put on articles, and I note that the random selection of templates I checked in the category were recently categorized as such by one editor, Jonesey95. Is this a problem for other categories? Has there been discussion about it anywhere? If it's just Category:Uncategorized pages, might it make sense to have the template only put articles in that category and put other-namespace pages into some other, undated category? Anomie⚔23:30, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
I am responsible for all, or almost all, of the templates in that category. A few other editors and I have been processing Wikipedia:Database reports/Uncategorized templates slowly, reducing its total count from about 8,000 templates in January to just over 2,000 today. I add categories or otherwise get many pages off of the list without adding ((Uncategorized)), but many I do not have the expertise to categorize, so rather than do it badly, I tag it for an expert to address. I have lost track of where the previous conversation happened, but in that previous conversation, I proposed that the ((Uncategorized)) template could be reprogrammed to sort tagged pages into categories by namespace. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:23, 13 May 2023 (UTC)
I have limited experience interacting with other maintenance categories, but it does seem like a problem that is kind of unique to uncategorized as most maintenance tasks don't generally apply to templates at all.
I agree it would make sense to split uncategorized based on namespace, but I think that even in that case it would be nice to have those sorted by date (for the same reasons it is nice to have the articles sorted by date). However, I can try to explore possibilities to set that up independently, I was just hoping it might've been a trivial improvement on your end. It seems to be more complicated than I anticipated.
@Pppery: I do seem to have missed this comment. But now that I look into it, is there any discussion by people who actually process usurpation requests that the sentence is no longer needed? I'm not very familiar with these processes, and it does not seem you've been active in them either. Anomie⚔11:24, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
The source code for the bot is available at User:AnomieBOT/source if you want to try to make use of it. I'm not interested in trying to run a bot on a wiki where I'm not at all active and don't even speak the language. Anomie⚔11:00, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
Issue with AnomieBOT
Hi, Anomie,
I'm usually contacting you about your other bot but this involves AnomieBOT. It keeps recreating Template talk:2022-23 Top 14 Table even though there is no Template page. It's been deleted 4 times over the past few days. Do I need to fully protect this page or would that not affect AnomieBOT? LizRead!Talk!03:34, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
It recreates it because Template talk:2022–23 Top 14 Table continues to exist. The template (the one with the icon) at the bottom of Template talk:2022-23 Top 14 Table explains this. Anomie⚔12:11, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello, AnomieBOT. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Gandhi Godse - Ek Yudh, a page you created, has not been edited in at least 5 months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.
If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
This is one of those cases where somebody screwed up and subsequent editors simply made it worse. We have an article in mainspace, Gandhi Godse – Ek Yudh, with an en-dash in the title; when it was created, it was a redirect to Rajkumar Santoshi. Not long after, AnomieBOT created a parallel redirect also to Rajkumar Santoshi from the same title but using a hyphen-minus instead of the dash. So far, so good. But a few days later both of these redirects were converted (by different people) into articles about the same film, and the one with the hyphen-minus in the title was moved to draftspace.
Lately when I remove material I don't bother rescuing the orphaned refs, because I know you'll come along and fix it. I know I'm being lazy but it's a real time saver for me. Thanks. GA-RT-22 (talk) 05:31, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
Looks like for a case like this, where AnomieBOT had cached a beyond-Open status and then that was reverted to Open plus On-Hold, the bot was using the cached beyond-Open status instead of leaving it in Open. Fixed now. Anomie⚔11:28, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
OTOH, now I've just re-denied it per WP:BOTNOTNOW, the proposer seems to lack much of any of the needed familiarity with the English Wikipedia to be trusted as a bot op. Anomie⚔11:44, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
That's fine, I denied it earlier myself so I'm glad I was going in the right direction initially (though your rationale is a bit more obvious than mine was). Primefac (talk) 14:08, 10 July 2023 (UTC)
The parameters of the task call for 8 date sections rather than a date range. Someone added July 11 early, which made for 9 date sections, so the bot archived the oldest one when it happened to be restarted for a code update to a different task. Anomie⚔11:01, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
Just a thank-you note for stuff like "Rescuing orphaned refs ("Simpson 116-117" from rev 1168848788; "TelferDunbar1979 159" from rev 1168848788; "STR Gordon Red" from rev 1168848788; "SRT Cawdor" from rev 1168848788; "EsleaMacDonald2012 8" from rev 1168848788)". Splitting articles would be much more difficult without this bot cleaning up after broken citations. I try not to break them, but it's really tedious, and some get broken anyway. — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 14:05, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
Potential minor bug with archiving deletion sorting entries
I noticed that there are two very old entries at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Computing from November and December 2022 (diffs when added: [1] and [2]). My guess as to why they've been skipped is it appears they were transcluded on the Computing page with a space after the namespace and before the page name:
((Wikipedia: Articles for deletion/OnePlus 11))
((Wikipedia: Articles for deletion/Apple M2))
It looks like it may be because the regex that decides to skip lines in User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/DeletionSortingCleaner.pm (assuming that's the current source) doesn't account for that? No idea if it's worth fixing but am curious:
returnundefunless$name=~m!^(?i:Wikipedia|WP):(?:Articles|Miscellany) for deletion/(.+)$!;
My perl is a bit rusty but I'd think that
returnundefunless$name=~m!^(?i:Wikipedia|WP) *: *(?:Articles|Miscellany) for deletion/(.+)$!;
would better match MediaWiki's template transclusion logic and, hopefully, wouldn't induce any false positives. Thanks! Skynxnex (talk) 22:09, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
Sometimes it's useful, particularly when it's an article linked in an edit summary (which should be done when someone is moving content between articles). If it's wrong, the best thing to do would be to supply the correct refs. Anomie⚔22:18, 12 August 2023 (UTC)
Looks like someone changed something in MediaWiki so the urn links the bot looks for come out from extlinks with the colon between the NIS and NSS incorrectly percent-encoded and the NSS incorrectly lowercased now. Anomie⚔00:14, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
I just checked on WP:SPER and noticed that the table was the same as I saw it last night. I was subsequently surprised to see that the navbox bot-reported and category request counts were very out of sync (13 bot-reported vs. 33 actual). Seems like AnomieBOT's last edit to User:AnomieBOT/SPERTable was over 24 hours ago, and the status page is reporting errors for this and a bunch of other tasks. I am not sure if I'm missing something or if this is a normal occurrence, but I haven't seen this behavior before. —PlanetJuice (talk • contribs) 00:44, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
Looks like the databases went read-only which caused a bunch of AnomieBOT's tasks to error out. Restarted, thanks for notifying me! Anomie⚔11:28, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
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Good start. A bit early but I'm marking as reviewed
To reply, leave a comment here and begin it with ((Re|North8000)). Please remember to sign your reply with ~~~~. (Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)
Hi. I am having trouble with ((tl:Format ISBN)). AnomieBOT used to reformat these without incident but yesterday I had failure with Keller & O'Meara Media Tales, both in Minneapolis and my sandbox. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Thank you for your bot. -SusanLesch (talk) 14:00, 8 October 2023 (UTC)
Dear @Anomie:, the bot has placed 2 incorrect COI's on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanki_King, I am Sanki and I disclosed it years ago, as can be seen on the talk page. I haven't edited the article for 4 years I think, and since the disclosure different editors have completely revamped the article, changed the tone, it is nothing like how I wrote it. And I have no intention to edit it ever again. Every source added and removed in the last 4 years are by other editors as can be seen in the history and talk page where I shared sources etc. There is a new set of third party sources that I have recently shared on the talk page to be added by editors, among other things.
Also, I have been looking for editors to ping who are experts in art articles so they can expand my article, will appreciate your support if there are any veteran art editors you know that you can point out. Regards SameStruggle (talk) 04:00, 17 October 2023 (UTC)
@Anomie: Looks like the bot has stopped updating the edit request tables again, with the same "pod missing" status. I don't see anywhere else this has been reported so figured I should let you know. Tollens (talk) 05:45, 19 October 2023 (UTC)
I have noticed that you have added a news channel in recent edit but this news channel has no article and the link was not matching or Dead link. Nnn edits (talk) 11:19, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
@Nnn edits: It would be useful if you would link the specific article (or, better, the specific edit) you're complaining about. Note that AnomieBOT is a bot, not a human editor. It likely did not "add a news channel".
I'm guessing you're complaining about this edit to List of television channels in Pakistan that you recently reverted. If that is the case, you are confused. In this edit you removed an entry that included the definition of a reference tag, leaving a big red error in the article here. AnomieBOT simply copied the removed reference definition to a different instance of the reference to resolve the error. Anomie⚔14:12, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
@Anomie in the top we mentioned that only add article that has own article in Wikipedia English but I revert your edit because there was no article that name. Nnn edits (talk) 14:26, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
@Nnn edits: You still seem to be extremely confused. I didn't make any edits at all, and the bot's edit was completely not as you assert. Please review the situation more carefully. Anomie⚔15:17, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
Broke again. Toolforge has apparently been having a lot of database issues lately, and AnomieBOT seems particularly sensitive to them. Anomie⚔23:30, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
A little appreciation today
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The bot did this edit and now the page has a problem on the maintenance tag. I attempted to fix it but I just thought I would leave this here and hope to get information. LuxembourgLover (talk) 19:29, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
If you did this because the references should be removed from the article, you have misunderstood the situation. Most likely, the article originally contained both <ref name="foo">...</ref> and one or more <ref name="foo"/> referring to it. Someone then removed the <ref name="foo">...</ref> but left the <ref name="foo"/>, which results in a big red error in the article. I replaced one of the remaining <ref name="foo"/> with a copy of the <ref name="foo">...</ref>; I did not re-insert the reference to where it was deleted, I just replaced one of the remaining instances. What you need to do to fix it is to make sure you remove all instances of the named reference so as to not leave any big red error.
If you reverted because I made an actual mistake, please be sure to also correct any reference errors in the page so I won't come back and make the same mistake again. Also, please post an error report at User talk:AnomieBOT so my operator can fix me! If the error is so urgent that I need to be stopped, also post a message at User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/OrphanReferenceFixer. Thanks! AnomieBOT⚡20:28, 17 November 2023 (UTC) If you do not wish to receive this message in the future, add ((bots|optout=AnomieBOT-OrphanReferenceFixer)) to your talk page.
Huh, that's a weird one. I've added some code tied to the above warning where if the bot is going to warn itself like this, it'll complain here and not make the edit to the article. Anomie⚔02:03, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
AnomieBOT lacks the user rights necessary to do that, even if it was a human and wanted to. You should take your request to WP:RFPP. Anomie⚔15:08, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Review and supervision for use of abusive vandalism on the page
Hi Dear @AnomieBOT, I am writing to you so that you can please monitor the page of the Colombian beauty queen Luz Adriana López, which is constantly being vandalized by the user @Sciencefish. You can review from the first edition how many reliable sources this user has deleted, he also puts meaningless codes, such as height, eye color, hair color and information that are in the few links that are still alive and others that he deleted, He also eliminated information about predecessors and successors in the pageantry journey such as Miss Universe Colombia and Miss Earth Colombia.
This user @Sciencefish has also been seen vandalizing other biographies of beauty queens from different nations, including candidates for Miss Earth, Miss World and Miss Universe, please try to block this user or put security on the page. I would greatly appreciate an analysis and prompt solution to this problem. Thanks U!!. 200.118.145.115 (talk) 04:31, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Jews in the Civil Rights movement - factual accuracy is disputed
I'm with Anomie on this one - if Rater is letting people add multiple subst-only wrappers (or really, for that matter, any wrapper templates) then Rater should be changed to avoid that; someone adding three task forces of the Africa project should be adding them as task forces of Africa, not as three separate wrappers. Primefac (talk) 01:53, 23 December 2023 (UTC)
(talk page watcher) @Maproom: Not all protected edit request tags are added with a blank |answered= parameter - if it's absent, you merely need to add either |answered=yes or the shorter form |ans=yes. In both cases, the yes may itself be shortened to y. Anyway, will you be joining us on 21 Jan? --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 22:03, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
Bot Needed
@AnomieBOT Hello Anomie. Could you use your bot to fix my draft article cite error? I'm having trouble fixing it. Here's the link. MinecraftPlayer321(talk) 02:05, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
AnomieBOT could have handled removing the <ref name=""/>, but likely not the other error. That task is currently only approved to run in mainspace though, not drafts. Anomie⚔12:34, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
Hello,
I was wondering if it would be possible to have a version of the random page script that would update daily, unless a button is pressed, causing it to change pages immediately for the rest of the cycle.
ThanksGeardona (talk to me?) 17:03, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
Your best bet to have the bot pick a new random page would be to edit the page remove the |date= from the template invocation. Anomie⚔23:45, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
Would it be possible to use something like clickable button in the template? Even if it resets the timer it would be ok. (if its not possible that is also fine) Geardona (talk to me?) 23:50, 24 January 2024 (UTC)
Is there a way to stop a bot from editing a page for a while
I was editing a draft and when I clicked publish, it said there was another edit and my publish would be disruptive. I published anyway (since I thought I could redo manually the other’s edit after) but… everything gone. My whole edit, all lost. I appreciate the bot to fix citations, but this situation is frustrating. The point of user name/draft page is to perfect a page as much as possible before publishing for others to see and edit, but now I lost lots of edit because of an outside unexpected edit. Again, I don’t blame the bot, just asking if there’s a way to prevent bot from editing a user name/draft page. — Daeva Trạc (talk) 04:18, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
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AnomieBOT III should have updated the broken redirect pages but it hasn't in 9 hours. Could you "restart" it? Many thanks. LizRead!Talk!18:23, 3 March 2024 (UTC)
Fixing url-inside-ref syntax instead of removing it
Thank you for your work. It would be helpful if the bot could fix this syntax <ref https://www.swr.de/sport/mehr-sport/leichtathletik/swr-sporthelden-2023-kugelstossen-yemisi-ogunleye-100.html /> as in Special:Diff/1211521503 instead of removing it altogether. Because the original edit was P&G-compliant if not technically correct, but then the bot removed the URL which in effect introduced unsourced statements to a BLP. An easy fix would be to convert it to a bare-url reference that can be filled later. Thanks, --Habst (talk) 14:40, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
I'll try to look into it when I have a chance. Meanwhile, if someone could determine whether that is a unique mistake or if different editors commonly do that rather than the correct syntax, that would be useful for my prioritization. Anomie⚔06:50, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
Why is the link to a linkedin page an unreliable source? I assume a website could be like that - but on the other hand a website should be a good source of information and confirmation of data.
Could I remove the comment in the bio I prepared?
thanks Lemonidess (talk) 14:36, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
Asking for protection of the article Paola Cortellesi from non registered recidive vandal who also admitted they are doing it for personal ideological and political beliefs and keeps causing disruption. 151.38.224.195 (talk) 20:14, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
Not at all familiar with these templates, so rather than just removing I'm leaving it here for further review. Primefac (talk) 06:24, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
Two years ago, after getting tired of edge cases when trying to scrape links out of the wikitext, I switched the bot to looking for ((TFAFULL)) which is a lot easier to parse for. In this case I see the ((TFAFULL)) was present originally but was removed in Special:Diff/1215188470 by User:MaranoFan. Looks like I forgot to update the bot's complaint message, and also that I forgot to ever add a check for the day being added to Template:TFA title/data.json. Anomie⚔13:10, 11 May 2024 (UTC)
Retrieving named refs from other articles
Would it be possible to get some information on exactly how this works? In particular, I'd like to understand why it didn't activate for this edit. Further details here. Sunrise(talk)01:16, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
At the moment the bot only checks pages linked in edit summaries. I turned off the linked-pages check in July 2023 because it seemed too often to cause false positives when people name a ref based on the newspaper or website. Anomie⚔00:31, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply, and I'm glad to hear the edit summary check is active. For the edit I'm asking about (which was in 2019), why does it seem that neither the edit summary check nor the linked-pages check worked correctly? Sunrise(talk)19:54, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
Digging into old on-wiki logs, I find it says "Terminology of alternative medicine: Revision 894510465 is transcluding something too b0rken to fix (Ref contains <ref>), skipping". Due to limitations of the expandtemplates API action (e.g. T235882), the bot can't handle refs inside of refs, for example when ((refn)) is used to contain a <ref>.
In 2021 I added support for some templates, including ((refn)) and ((efn)), so that's not so much of a problem anymore. The bot still doesn't support other templates like ((r)) or ((sfn)) that do more than just add a single ref though. Anomie⚔00:30, 15 May 2024 (UTC)
You seem confused. You linked to an edit where AnomieBOT added dates to ((citation needed)) tags added by a human editor in a previous edit, which likely means you should talk to that human rather than posting here. Anomie⚔11:32, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
About PeerReviewArchiver
Hey Anomie! Per a rough consensus at this discussion, it seems there's some need for additional automated archiving of peer review pages. Since AnomieBOT already performs a very similar task, would you be willing to expand the PeerReviewArchiver function to close reviews that have gone unanswered for over three months? Let me know if you have any questions! —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 01:50, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
Hi Anomie, I hope you're doing well. I noticed on a Russian village article that AnomieBOT had added a date parameter for the ((Infobox Russian inhabited locality)) infobox back in July 2020, when date parameters are invalid – see Roza, Chelyabinsk Oblast's history for an example. You might already be aware of this, but I thought I'd let you know to avoid the same issue happening in the future. I've rollbacked the ones that were still rollbackable, I don't know if you want to try and reverse it for the ones remaining that aren't. Thanks! --Ferien (talk) 17:49, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
Redrose64, indeed, no examples of it happening recently. Was just looking through some random articles and came across it thinking it might need attention. Thanks to everyone for finding the source of the problem so quickly :) --Ferien (talk) 21:00, 13 June 2024 (UTC)
That's right. Specifically, it was added in October 2010, and finally removed in March 2023. Since AnomieBOT was told it was a dated maintenance template, it unsubstified it and it dated instances of it on pages that happened to be in categories indicating that some maintenance template was missing a |date=. Anomie⚔23:23, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
This is the diff labelled: "add & merge list from SmackBot." I referred to this list in my interview with the Signpost. At this point the infobox's code contained: ((fact|date=(({date|))))} so it was necessary to date this. You will find my 2009 objection to this practice at Template_talk:Infobox_Russian_inhabited_locality/Archive_1#Forkit. However the user in question contributed a huge amount to our coverage of Russia, so it was probably a wise decision not press the point overmuch. All the best: RichFarmbrough18:38, 16 June 2024 (UTC).
Just thought I'd drop a note that AnomieBOT III is off its usual 6:02 report issuing schedule which it generally maintains like clockwork. It's a little unpredictable and wacky right now, but there are also problems running queries with Quarry and Community Tech bot has been off=kilter with issuing its Wikipedia:Database reports/Orphaned talk pages, too so I guess there could be database problems. But I thought I'd let you know. Typically, I use Quarry as a backup for AnomieBOT III to find broken redirect but that's been unavailable for days now. Thanks. LizRead!Talk!22:20, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
Seems like things are running now. I did just restart the bot to apply an update to the PeerReviewArchiver task. Given the timing, possibly it was in the middle of the BrokenRedirectDeleter task and had to restart. OTOH, I also see that for the past few days it has been taking longer to process than it had been, mostly without any obvious explanation in the logs. So possibly there's also increased database load making its queries slower. Anomie⚔23:41, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
That might explain its irregularity in its reports along with why other bots are having the same problem. Still no update on Quarry issues though but that's not your concern. LizRead!Talk!05:02, 18 June 2024 (UTC)