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Forum: The Situation Room > Bot edit policy proposal



This is a policy proposal: whenever a large series of repetitive edits (whether they are automated by a bot account or simply done by a regular account en masse) are planned by any contributor, the contributor must first post their intent and wait 48 hours for consensus by silence or discussion. This is to ensure that everyone who has ideas related to the edits can weigh in. Blue Rook  talk  contribs 19:27, September 15, 2010 (UTC)

I agree. I'm obviously not the best judge of what constitutes an allowable mass change, and as you said, it'll be much better to get everyone's opinion before doing anything. --Pyramidhead 19:43, September 15, 2010 (UTC)
In case anyone starts panicking, the changes the bot's currently busy with are just changing back the sidebars to the original template. Nothing drastic going on. --Pyramidhead 20:11, September 15, 2010 (UTC)

Adding release dates[]

I'm planning to use the bot to add the DVD/VHS/Blu-ray release dates to the sidebar on each episode page. --Pyramidhead 23:50, September 22, 2010 (UTC)

I added a param to the sidebar template that will turn the OOU line on or off, regardless of what other parameters are present. Right now the bot is adding "line = 1" to the appropriate pages. --Pyramidhead 02:13, October 14, 2010 (UTC)

Some edits[]

The current category is preventing me from making an in-universe Music category under Category:Culture. This would be similar to Memory Alpha's use of "Star Trek music".
Similarly, prevents the creation of an in-universe Magazines category to go under Category:News media. Also, current name is misleading as it's really just cataloging one single magazine.
For consistency with other categories, plus not all FBI employees are agents.
  • Rework city page categories
Now that there are a number of them, I'm not a fan of putting cities in every possible category they belong to, as it defeats the purpose of all the subcategories. What I propose is to limit each page to one "Cities in..." page, either the state or country where they are located, except for ones in a more localized area. So Los Angeles would go in both Cities in California and Cities in the Los Angeles area, while Phoenix would go in Cities in Arizona only, and Berlin would go in Cities in Germany only. This is based on Wikipedia's system. --Pyramidhead (talk) 18:00, August 9, 2013 (UTC)
I agree with the top 3 but think I need clarification on the last point. What sub-categories are going to be created? At the moment it seems that "Cities in Los Angeles" is the only subcategory more localised than state, but will there be others? And which state ones will be created? For example, I believe Pittsburgh is currently the only Pennsylvania city on the wiki, so will "cities in pennsylvania" be created with only that article in - and what about Columbia, whose state hasn't been mentioned in the 24verse?--Acer4666 (talk) 18:50, August 9, 2013 (UTC)
Basically, I want there to be only one cities category for most pages, corresponding to most specific known location. And I agree that there aren't enough cities for certain states to warrant their own category, so I would put Philadelphia and Colombia in "Cities in the United States" and remove them from "Cities." The same for countries; Dushanbe would go in just Category:Cities since there's never going to be a "Countries in Tajikistan" category. The only exception to the one-category rule would be for the L.A. area, as it seems wrong to me to put cities in there and then leave them out of California, so to speak. I don't predict there being any more local area categories like that so it would be the one exception. --Pyramidhead (talk) 19:29, August 9, 2013 (UTC)
I see, that all makes sense - I guess it will be obvious on the Category:Cities in the United States page that there are more contained in the subcategories. Sounds good!--Acer4666 (talk) 21:48, August 9, 2013 (UTC)
Got another one: I'd like to add a DEFAULTSORT to every character page that doesn't have one yet and needs one. I don't know why on earth so many use the pipe on every single category, but I'm noticing a bunch of them are getting improperly sorted in all the new categories. --Pyramidhead (talk) 19:20, August 12, 2013 (UTC)
Yeah sounds good - the featured article category needs to be piped "firstname surname" but that's a quick job to do afters :)--Acer4666 (talk) 20:40, August 12, 2013 (UTC)
OK - the bot seems to have gone through and removed the pipe from the last category on every page, kept it everywhere else, then stuck a DEFAULTSORT at the bottom of the categories. By "needs one" I thought you meant pages that weren't already being sorted properly. This has left a lot of pages in a mess - can you revert the edits that the bot has done in that last run?--Acer4666 (talk) 09:53, August 29, 2013 (UTC)
I noticed this too, but, it is not necessarily bad right? (None of the sorts are broken I think) More "incomplete" then "bad". Ideally, the bot would have removed all the individual sorts (not just the last sort) and placed the DEFAULTSORT on top of the categories. But it got partway there. Unless I'm missing something, as I see it now, we can leave those edits alone and just finish up individual cases whenever we find them, right? Blue Rook  talk  contribs 00:29, August 30, 2013 (UTC)
New request - I want to edit dates across the wiki to use the new template. This will be an in-place edit; I just want to replace all the dates that exist at the moment so they're correctly linked and formatted. --Pyramidhead (talk) 06:46, January 2, 2014 (UTC)
Seems like a lot of this has been done already - thankfully I agree with the changes, not sure about everyone else? Will you only run the bot on certain pages to avoid adding the template to in-universe dates?--Acer4666 (talk) 13:33, January 2, 2014 (UTC)
Yes, it will only be for production/OOU dates. --Pyramidhead (talk) 19:31, January 2, 2014 (UTC)


Gender categories - Seems a logical extension since we already group female antagonists. Anyone opposed to adding Males or Females as the first in-universe category for each character? Some technicalities to think of; lot of characters are just last names, so we wouldn't add either one unless the person showed up on screen or was specifically said to be he or she. Other than that I think it's a no-brainer --Pyramidhead (talk) 06:08, October 13, 2016 (UTC)

I'm not keen on this idea - I think that female antagonists is a bit of a dodgy category anyway. I think adding this would be over-categorising pages - do we also categories for age, ethnicity, sexual orientation? I don't see any real need to group characters this way. I'd probably be for removing the female antagonists category given we also have a list page of them as well--Acer4666 (talk) 07:24, October 13, 2016 (UTC)
No compelling reason we need to, but it's an encyclopedia - generally I think we should categorize as much as possible if there are enough articles to warrant it. Gender is immediately obvious compared to your other examples; anyways, age is meaningless since the articles are written infinite years in the future. Also, for whatever it's worth, it would be great to have if we ever wanted to add this special page! --Pyramidhead (talk) 08:25, October 13, 2016 (UTC)
I disagree that we should add as many categories as possible. I think that over categorisation is problematic for the pages they are on, and the system we have at the minute for the character categories is logical and sufficient. Adding gender categories I believe is a step towards over categorisation--Acer4666 (talk) 22:40, October 13, 2016 (UTC)

Day templates - Having the day entries (January 1, etc.) as templates made sense when they were only displayed on the home page. Now with them being linked from a lot of pages, I think it would make more sense to move them to the main namespace. Right now it's only possible to edit them if you know to type in Template:Month X; this would make it easier to keep track of edits & encourage newer users to pitch in on them as well. Memory alpha does this, and I think it would be cool to also add that calendar template on each one - you can have it only show up on the actual page so we could still transclude the page onto the home page like we do now. --Pyramidhead (talk) 23:15, October 13, 2016 (UTC)

As a neat bonus - this would put us over 8000 articles for the first time! :D --Pyramidhead (talk) 23:16, October 13, 2016 (UTC)
This makes sense, to me - the date pages are as much content as anything else, and we already have the years etc. and as the day ones start to be built up and linked from around the wiki I reckon we should move them into the main namespace--Acer4666 (talk) 07:33, October 14, 2016 (UTC)
Will do this tonight/tomorrow if no objections --Pyramidhead (talk) 00:46, October 15, 2016 (UTC)
Apparently the bot isn't allowed to move pages anymore --Pyramidhead (talk) 05:52, October 15, 2016 (UTC)
Please remember the bot policy - you need to wait for 48 hours for everyone to have the chance to chime in. I'll add the pagemove right to the bot once that time has elapsed--Acer4666 (talk) 08:18, October 15, 2016 (UTC)
Oh I thought it was one day. Was just trying a simulated run since I had to install everything again. Thanks! --Pyramidhead (talk) 08:57, October 15, 2016 (UTC)

Bot edit to add Template:Dc and Template:Title to episode guide pages as discussed. (I'll likely have to go through afterward and fix any glitches as well) --Pyramidhead (talk) 23:14, December 20, 2016 (UTC)

How are you planning to do this with a bot, technically? It seems like it may be better to do it manually, I don't mind helping out with it if so--Acer4666 (talk) 01:13, December 21, 2016 (UTC)
Should be able to pattern match all the 00:00:00s and The following... etc. Maybe even the screen titles, though I don't know if they're all BOLD CAPS. --Pyramidhead (talk) 01:58, December 21, 2016 (UTC)
There are some times in h3 headers, and some in italics. And what about the characters in the previously segments? Are you able to provide exactly the matching code you will run before running it? It seems like if the bot is gonna miss things and we're gonna have to go through each page manually anyway, it'd make sense to just do the whole thing like that?--Acer4666 (talk) 02:16, December 21, 2016 (UTC)
Hey sorry, back now - I'll do my best to catch everything & will go through all 204 pages afterward to verify it all worked. --Pyramidhead (talk) 00:59, January 7, 2017 (UTC)
OK awesome, sounds good - just be sure to make all automated edits from the bot account and all manual ones from your normal account! Looking forward to it getting implemented :)--Acer4666 (talk) 14:01, January 8, 2017 (UTC)

Edits from a bot account[]

I would like to clarify on the policy that if someone has control of a bot account, they should only use that account for automated edits. Manual edits from a bot account are not looked at by recent changes patrollers and so any mistakes/errors/changing of pages by a person is not looked at. Does everyone agree?--Acer4666 (talk) 13:50, July 30, 2014 (UTC)

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