The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: JLaTondre

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic (operator initiated & supervised)

Programming Language(s): Perl (uses perlwikipedia)

Function Summary: Remove stale in-use templates from articles

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Daily to weekly

Edit rate requested: 10 accesses per minute (built in delay of at least 6 seconds between any read or write)

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

Function Details:

It is not uncommon for under-construction templates to be applied to an article and the article be "abandoned" by the tagger. I have seen articles that with such templates that have not been edited in months.

My bot will check articles that include article under-construction templates (as well as their associated redirects) for the time stamp of the last edit. If the last edit was more than 7 days ago (configurable parameter, but this seems a reasonable number), it removes the template. These templates currently include:

• ((Inprogress))
• ((Inuse))
• ((Inuse-section))
• ((Inuse-until))
• ((Isrev))
• ((Notfinished))
• ((Underconstruction))

It does not search the article history to see when the template was actually added. If an article is actively being edited, it leaves it to the article editors to decide if the template is still needed. This means that an under-construction template can remain on an article for a considerable time (beyond the recommended "several days"), but if the article is actively being edited, I think that should be left to the discretion of the editors.

In addition, it will also check for articles that include non-article under-construction templates (as well as their associated redirects) and remove them from the article. These templates are not meant to be used in the article space. These templates currently include:

• ((User page construction))
• ((UserWorkInProgress))
• ((Work in Progress))
• ((Workpage))

If there are changes to the under-construction templates, the bot's template list will be updated appropriately.

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. --ST47Talk·Desk 12:07, 3 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Trial edits completed. I did the first 10, realized I forgot a word (days) from the edit summery, and fixed that. The remaining 40 edits occurred without issue. As a bit of trivia, the article with the longest time since the last edit was Sava Tekelija at 199 days. -- JLaTondre 01:05, 4 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Great, everything looks good. No major issues, the edit summary was a litle unusual, but once days was added it made sense.  Approved. Matt/TheFearow (Talk) (Contribs) (Bot) 01:57, 4 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.