Operator: Eugène van der Pijll (talk)
Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic
Programming Language(s): Perl
Function Summary: Adding redirects for abbreviated titles
Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): one time run
Edit rate requested: about 6 edits per minute
Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y
Function Details: As you can see at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people), there is no consensus on the format for initials in article titles. This leads to duplicate articles, such as C.N. Liew and C. N. Liew. I propose to create redirects to existing articles to prevent this from happening again. The bot recognizes titles in two formats, "X. Y." and "X.Y.", and creates missing redirects in four formats: "X. Y.", "X.Y.", "X Y" and "XY". For example, for the existing article R. C. Lucas, Eubot will create the redirects R C Lucas, R.C. Lucas, and RC Lucas.
This will be done for all articles with abbreviations in the above format, including:
I'd especially like some feedback on the last two categories; I could filter these out, but I don't think the redirects do any harm. There are some problematic titles: for example, does T.A.T.u. need a redirect T. A. T. u.? I'll try to filter these ones out by hand before running the bot.
I have an initial list of 30,000 redirects to add, based on the October database dump; when those are done, I will add new redirects irregularly.
I have mentioned this bot proposal at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (people), and will also leave messages at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football and Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (abbreviations), where this topic has also been discussed. Eugène van der Pijll (talk) 02:09, 24 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Looks good. Approved. — Coren (talk) 06:24, 27 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]