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: Anomie⚔

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic, unsupervised

Programming language(s): Perl

Source code available: User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/AltLinkTemplateSubster.pm

Function overview: Replace templates such as ((cbb link)) when no longer necessary with the generated wikilink to reduce the expensive parser function count.

Edit period(s): Daily

Estimated number of pages affected: For the initial run, 86 for ((cbb link)) and 121 for ((cfb link)). Then it depends on how frequently people add new instances of the templates and how frequently people create the missing pages.

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Yes

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

Function details: There exist some templates, such as ((cbb link)) and ((cfb link)), whose purpose is to make sure certain links are always blue even if the "best" target article does not yet exist. For example, a link may be desired to 2009 Wiki University football team, but if that does not exist then a link to the general Wiki University football team would be better than a redlink (after all, who knows if the 2009 team will ever be WP:Notable), and if that doesn't exist then we can just link to Wiki University. Whether this is better than creating hundreds of redirects from every "(({year))} (({school))} football team" is not the point, apparently some of the relevant projects have already made that decision.

These templates must use the expensive #ifexists parser function to determine which link to display, and we should worry about this because otherwise we wouldn't have a limit of only 500 of these per page. Therefore, when the desired article exists we should replace the template with a simple wikilink to lower the expensive function limit. This bot task will do just that, by watching the corresponding categories (e.g. Category:Excessive uses of cbb link) and making the needed replacements.

At the moment, the bot will process ((cbb link)) and ((cfb link)). But other similar templates (e.g. ((ct link))) may be added to the list as needed. Anomie⚔ 21:56, 21 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Looks straight-forward to me. Someone has already decided the template use is excessive (hence the cat) and marked the article, the bot will just be doing work identified by human editors, the task is bot appropriate, zero coding issues for this particular bot operator, appear to be no communications issues with bot operator, either. IMO, looks good. --69.225.14.204 (talk) 02:25, 22 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

((BAGAssistanceNeeded)) It's been a week, someone do something. Anomie⚔ 12:39, 29 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (20 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Go on then. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 11:56, 8 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. [1] Anomie⚔ 04:06, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I presume you'll want to revert the three Template: namespace /doc changes? - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 17:09, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure, since those doc pages don't actually need to be using the templates in question. I'll ask Nmajdan to comment. Anomie⚔ 20:35, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it really matters. They were being used for demonstration purposes only.—NMajdan•talk 21:12, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

((BAGAssistanceNeeded)) Anyone? Anomie⚔ 03:10, 2 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

 Done MBisanz ^talk 07:12, 13 December 2009 (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.