Misplaced Pages

• It's an odd one, this. I think it's useful to mark as inactive those bots that don't appear to be actively editing the wiki, so I support the activity. But I would hate to see this marking become something that might hamper the activity of useful bots that have to cease activity for long periods because the user cannot attend to them. So please be careful and responsive about your actions. If somebody objects just pop their bot into an "ignore" file and put a copy of the list of bots you're ignoring into a prominent place related to your monitoring activities. --TS 00:07, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

• Not what I'd call a high-value activity, but seems harmless enough. I can't imagine an incorrect tagging would break anything. However, this bit: "As for whether or not the bot in question is active, that shouldn't be my problem because the people updating the inactive list should have weeded out the editing ones. It is hardly my fault that 7SeriesBOT was on that list, because someone else must have made the mistake of not seeing they do deleting only instead." is completely the opposite of what I want to see from any bot operator. Propagating wrong information across the 'pedia is indeed the problem of whoever does it, and if you're not willing to take responsibility for the edits, you shouldn't be making them. Change that attitude and take full responsibility for your edits and I'll have no problem with this task. 28bytes (talk) 12:47, 22 June 2012 (UTC)
• Support - why not? mabdul 18:10, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

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

No bots are handling {{Cite JSTOR}}

I used {{Cite JSTOR}} on Vincent Price (educator); however, no bot is handling it. I assume Citation bot should be the one that did it. I even clicked the "jump the queue" button, but could find no way to have the bot take action. Ryan Vesey Review me! 17:12, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Could you specify how bots are supposed to handle this template, and why they should do this instead of relying on editors to do it themselves? It isn't fair to expect volunteer programmers to monitor all templates and volunteer to support them. --TS 00:10, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

To be fair to Ryan the instructions at Template:Cite jstor do say that "a bot will automatically generate a full reference". There is a small amount of discussion on the templates talk page as to what the problem may be. However, there also seems to be no documentation as to what bot carries out this task and this seems an obvious place to ask for confirmation of what bot does do it. Dpmuk (talk) 00:37, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Citation bot is supposed to handle it, thus it is an issue with that particular bot. Materialscientist (talk) 00:41, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I missed all of this. User:Smith609 isn't actively editing. Should {{Cite JSTOR}} be deprecated or should a notice be left? What's the solution. Ryan Vesey Review me! 02:26, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Delinking dates

A proposal has been offered to create a bot to delink dates. Please comment at WT:MOSNUM#Delinking dates. Jc3s5h (talk) 12:35, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Bots delinking Romanian interwikis

I've been noticing a number of different bots removing interwiki links to Romanian Misplaced Pages articles over the past couple of months, and it's not clear to me why they're doing that, since the links appear to be valid iw links to the appropriate pages on ro-wiki. Can someone with better knowledge of interwiki bots explain why the bots are doing that? (Examples: from April, from today). 28bytes (talk) 12:36, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I believe those two examples you gave are as a result of the interwiki links pointing to disambiguation pages.  Hazard-SJ  ✈  01:04, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

They're supposed to, aren't they? Plenty of interwiki links on Baker County, for example, pointing to disambiguation pages in other languages. What's different about the Romanian disambiguation pages? 28bytes (talk) 02:20, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Unless ro:MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage is incomplete, the affected templates are retrieved from the working copy of the wikipedia family file and we need a bug tracker to update it. I've done it in pyrev:10415, see also .  @xqt 06:18, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! 28bytes (talk) 16:23, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

The Un-authorized use of a Bot in the Latvian Misplaced Pages by User in the Chinese Misplaced Pages, being also an authoized Bot-owner in the English Misplaced Pages, or, an (a possibly) un-authorized Global-Bot.

"Hi, I just noticed your bot is running in the Latvian Misplaced Pages without a required bot flag. According to the policy a request must be made for every bot before actually running them. Thank you in advance for your cooperation and best regards," -- zh:User:Edgars2007 (User:Edgars2007; lv:User:Edgars2007)（zh:User_talk:Edgars2007 (User talk:Edgars2007; lv:User_talk:Edgars2007)） 2012年6月25日 (一) 07:17 (UTC)

— KC9TV 22:13, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Is there a bot being run on the English Misplaced Pages? Is it unauthorized? Every language project has their own rules, their own admins, etc. (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 22:54, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it is; even on the title, I said so, and I was merely giving a "heads-up", so to speak, especially to himself. This is not a vindictive report (and I am too sickly to do any such thing at the moment, anyway). — KC9TV 22:58, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

If his English bot is approved and not causing problems, then this report is simply being a "tattle-tale" ... it's moot for this project (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 23:17, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

• The point is, the English language is not his first language, and he is probably not very good at it either, and he might in fact had mistaken the "local" English approval for a "global" one, — a global approval; and these, at and at , appear to suggest that it is so. Perhaps you, Sir, care to brush up your Chinese by informing him of this (which is anyway perhaps best done by an administrator)?
• However, is this really a matter for Meta instead? Well, I don't know, and I am sorry if that is the correct avenue instead. — KC9TV 01:19, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

If there's no issue with his English bot, and the problems span multiple Misplaced Pages's, then YES, meta is obviously the location - as you already answered. ANI certainly is not the right location. ✉→◌BWilkins◌←✎ 12:19, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Answered in ANI.Justincheng12345 (talk) (urgent news here) 15:28, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Request: "Bad link" advice for interwiki bots

Some time ago I came across a spurious interlanguage link that connected hantavirus to the musician mg:Hanta from Madagascar. I removed the link, only to find it soon re-added by a bot. I eventually realized that I needed to remove all of the incorrect links from the articles in all the other-language Wikipedias. I did this -- quite a daunting task, given the difficulty of verifying the topic and editing an article in an unfamiliar language -- and it worked for about eight months. After that, a bot added it again, for reasons that are not clear to me. Looking at the talk pages for bots that handle interwiki links, I see that I'm not the only one who has had this frustrating experience; and I see others being advised to remove the link from all the Wikipedias. This is bad advice: first, because fixing an error in an article in one language shouldn't require editing in a list of other, unfamiliar languages; and second, because it doesn't work permanently or reliably. I only now learned that this can be solved simply and easily by commenting out the interwiki link. I'd like to request that bots that add interlanguage links make this experience easier by including information in the edit summary and the bot user page that will give clear and correct advice on how to fix incorrectly added links. Thanks. --Amble (talk) 16:09, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

The reason it happened looking at it is that a number of bots used the -hint:en parameter in pywikipedia assuming that the article named Hanta on en would be the same one as on mg. But it wasn't, it was a redirect. This is technically human error. Not actually bot error persay. The problem with the commenting out method you have now used is that it will forever prevent proper interwiki links from being created unless done manually. -DJSasso (talk) 16:15, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Why will that prevent proper interwiki links? It should only affect mg:Hanta. If it has something to do with the comment appearing in the middle of the list of interwikis, perhaps mg:Hanta should be commented out and moved out of the list. Ryan Vesey Review me! 16:23, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

I take his comment to mean that bots will not create an interwiki link from en:hantavirus to a hypothetical Malagasy-language article on the same topic. Interlanguage links to/from other articles should be fine. --Amble (talk) 16:26, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

(ec)It will also prevent any future interwikis for a mg:hantavirus article that is created cause bots will skip interwikiing it because it already has a link en and will consider it a double interwiki situation which bots will skip. That in turn will also mean bots will skip any future changes to the Hantavirus article on all wikis because of the double link from mg. So it will affect up to two articles on every langauge that has an article on each of the topics. The easier fix would be to (however badly it may turn out) is create a stub on mg for hantavirus and link it to the en article...this will prevent the other from being added as an interwiki when a bot operator makes a mistake and says that hanta should be linked to hantavirus. -DJSasso (talk) 16:30, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. That's not much of a problem, compared to the larger problem of incorrect links being persistently recreated. If some day someone does (hypothetically) write an article on hantavirus on the Malagasy-language Misplaced Pages, I'm sure it won't take long for the correct interwiki link to be created. If you believe that's a significant problem, could you suggest an alternative way of cleaning up the incorrect links that is both reasonable and effective? Whether the root cause involves human error or not, I'm asking for help in avoiding unnecessary frustration and futility in trying to clean up after these bot edits. --Amble (talk) 16:26, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Usually these situations are cleaned up quickly and easily by removing the offending link from all wikis. But you have already said that is something you don't like. And I do understand it doesn't prevent another bot operator from accidentally thinking the Hanta article on both wikis is the same. But there isn't much we can do to stop such human error. -DJSasso (talk) 16:32, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

I disagree that repeatedly editing a number of articles in unfamiliar languages is quick or easy. And human error is at most a small part of the problem here. Any such human error is rapidly compounded by bot edits. The idea of asking users to create stubs in unfamiliar languages, as the easiest way of fixing a small error in their primarly language Misplaced Pages, is not sensible. Commenting out the interwiki links is better: if bots have a proven history of making a mess of the interlanguage links in a given article, then it's a good thing to stop them from editing those links. It's perfectly find if manual intervention is required to create a hypothetically correct link at some future date. --Amble (talk) 16:37, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

The example of hanta is extremely rare. It is not often that an article on one wiki is a redirect on another with the same spelling. So the solution to the hanta case is not the solution I would suggest for all articles, just the solution for this one. As for the others, it most certainly is easy to just go and remove interwikis from langauges you don't edit in a matter of seconds. I managed to fix the hanta problem in less than a couple of minutes because all you are doing is deleting the mg link. The fact that the other languages are not my languages doesn't matter because I don't actually have to read the article. I just have to be able to read the bad interwiki. As for the interface itself, I just change my preferences to show me english for all the interfaces, you do that once and you never have to do it again. It is completely unacceptable to stop all bot activity on multiple articles when the fix is a very simple one. That is like trying to kill a fly with a cannon. -DJSasso (talk) 16:41, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Where is this preference that shows English for all the interfaces, that you only need to set once? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:57, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

I didn't say it was a preference for all interfaces. I said I change my preferences (note the s) to show me English for all interfaces. I only have to do it once as in once for each language, meaning I don't have to change it every time I go back to that wiki. So the initial time I make a fix there will be a slight increase in time to make my interface English, but any future visits it will still be English. -DJSasso (talk) 17:10, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

You managed to "fix" the hanta problem in the same way I did, in 2009. Unfortunately, that's not adequate for several reasons. First: as you yourself said, you haven't read the articles. If you can't read Cyrillic, you have no idea whether the Ukrainian-language article was about the virus, the musician, or neither. Second: even if that is the correct solution, most users confronted with this situation will waste time repeatedly reverting the bots before they find that out, because the bots give no guidance on how to revert their incorrect edits. Third: it's a fool's errand, because one bot or another will add it back sooner or later. But really, all I'm asking is that bots making these sorts of edits should link users to sensible guidance about how to repair them -- preferably in the edit summary and on the bot user page. Some bots, such as User:ClueBot NG, do already include such a helpful note in their edit summaries. --Amble (talk) 17:18, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Actually it is easy to tell if it is the same article or not even if you don't speak the language, you go look at the categories its in and the interwikis on those categories. Again takes all of a couple of seconds. The guidance is on the interwiki page it tells you how to fix incorrect interwikis I believe. However, I believe it gives you the same advice you reject here. That being said incorrect interwikis are not the end of the world. If someone doesn't know how to fix them or doesn't feel comfortable going to those wikis to fix them, someone who does will. Looking at that page it only happened a couple of times a couple years apart. That isn't really a big problem. -DJSasso (talk) 17:29, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

It only happened a couple of times only because the rest of the time, nobody was putting in the effort to prevent bots from re-adding the incorrect links. I didn't reject the advice: I tried it, and found it was not effective. More broadly, I'm a bit troubled by the implication that wasted editor time, unnecessary frustration, and spurious interwiki links are minor concerns, while the important thing is to avoid getting in the way of (hypothetically useful) bot edits. This seems to me to be precisely backwards. --Amble (talk) 17:46, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

An additional note: apparently, when I cleaned up the same problem in 2009, I did include mg:Hanta in an HTML comment, successfully protecting the article from having the spurious interwiki link reinserted. However, this was broken by the following edit a few months later: . That edit was a user on AWB, which set off the avalanche of bot edits. Another user removed the interlanguage link (yet again) on Hanta, but did not know to clean up all the other languages, so a bot incorrectly restored it (yet again) shortly thereafter. The point remains that the correct response to this is not obvious, and users have unnecessarily gone through a lot of frustration and wasted time as a result. --Amble (talk) 18:38, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

A bot readded mg:hanta. There has to be a better solution to this. Ryan Vesey Review me! 13:52, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Wow, it happened even sooner than I expected. I guess I was right to put the supposedly quicky and easy "fix" in quotation marks. What happened is that a user from English Misplaced Pages, User:LeadSongDog, re-added the link at mg:Hanta. To me, this proves the points that a technical measure is needed to stop the bots from re-adding the incorrect interlanguage links, and that blind editing of articles in a language you don't understand is the last thing we should be encouraging people to do. --Amble (talk) 14:42, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Again this is a human problem, not a bot problem as evidenced by the fact it was a human who caused the problem. We have to assume that people are doing the right thing. -DJSasso (talk) 15:00, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

It is entirely a bot problem. There are situations where bots are unable to realize that a human has made an error and where human error is likely. The only solution to this is to add a hidden comment around the interwiki link. Ryan Vesey Review me! 15:03, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Which then affects multiple articles on multiple wikis. That isn't an acceptable solution. The solution is simple if you aren't willing to fix the incorrect wikis you ask the bot op to. That is part of the required conditions to run a bot like this. To fix their mistakes. Either way in this particular case it won't happen again because someone has re-created a dab page at Hanta which someone erroneously changed to a redirect. IW bots only link dab pages to dab pages so it won't happen again, and explains why it hadn't happened on that page in years. -DJSasso (talk) 15:05, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

You're again saying that it hadn't happened on that page in years. This is entirely wrong. The reality is as I've already pointed out: the reason why it hadn't happened in years is simply that the incorrect links have stood for years, except for brief periods when someone removed them. Even when all the incorrect links on all languages were removed, it took months (in 2009) or one day (just now) for them all to reappear. --Amble (talk) 15:17, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it only took a day this time because someone trying to help you messed up. Either way this is the solution until the centralization of interwikis in one location is completed. -DJSasso (talk) 15:33, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

I was responding to your specific claim "it hadn't happened on that page in years", which (as I said) was quite incorrect. In response to which you tried to change the subject. Also, I'm still troubled by the implication that the overriding concern is to avoid tying the bots' hands in any way, and needless editor frustration and wasted time are an acceptable trade-off. --Amble (talk) 15:41, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

We save more editors time by being able to use bots than we lose due to them. So yes it is an acceptable trade off that once in awhile we have to fix a problem like this. The alternative would be having to do it all manually wasting more editors time and causing more frustration. -DJSasso (talk)

That's a bit of an exaggeration: commenting out one interwiki link in one article is note remotely the same as "having to do it all manually". And you're still not acknowledging that your "it hadn't happened on that page in years" is incorrect. Why? --Amble (talk) 15:51, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Some of these points are certainly worth considering. Per policy some the bots running interlanguage maintaining scripts at toolserver are denied since april. As we are expecting m:Wikidata I no longer feel caused to spend a lot of time into that script, maybe except of some bug fixing if necessary.  @xqt 06:32, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Some procedural notes (I'm not responding to this discussion in depth as I'm on vacation): Interwiki bots are exclusion-compliant, and interwiki bots have been consolidated on the Toolserver due to concerns about memory usage, not the bots' behavior. Cheers, — madman 13:47, 9 July 2012 (UTC)