RABot

Heading lists

moved from User talk:Dragons flight:

You bot just made an edit to Wikipedia:Articles requested for more than a year and did nothing but add copy of the TOC to the top of the article. I doubt this was intended. SimonP 19:57, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Well, in one sense it was intended, but I agree with you that it was not particularly desirable. On many of the more complicated requested articles subpages, it has been the practice to provide a list at the top of the page composed of just the first level headings so one can get a feel for whether they are in the right place without trying to sort through what can be a fairly complicated nest of subheadings and subsubheadings on the TOC. (See requested articles: natural sciences, applied arts and sciences, etc.) One of the things the bot was designed to do was keep such lists synced with the list of top level headings. However, I agree that such a list serves no real purpose if the page structure isn't complicated. I have now modified the code to only use such a list if there are at least 10 subheadings in addition to the main list of headings. That seems like a reasonable approach to me.

On the utility of automation

moved from User talk:Dragons flight:

Also I hope a human checks every new article before it is removed from RA. If a new page is a copyvio or vandalism it should not be removed from the list. - SimonP 19:57, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

On the more significant question of human checks, this is a discussion worth having. The answer is no. Presently there are slightly less than 16000 requests for new articles spread across 13 pages in Category:Wikipedia requested articles (which is itself much smaller than Category:Wikipedia missing topics). Each day roughly 50-100 requested pages are created without being removed from the list by their creator (i.e. a net 50-100 blue links a day). A variety of editors have worked to keep WP:RA moderately in order (for example User:DMG413 who climbed as high as 164 in the list of Wikipedians by edits almost exclusively through working on RA, and who now seems to have left the project). Even so, after a couple of weeks, a single RA subpage may accumulate 30, 50, 100 blue links, even if all editors are trying to do is remove the blue links (without any special checking). This has led to a small number of editors, myself included, who laboriously go through and purge the accumulated blue links every once in a while. (To say nothing of alphabetizing sections, and looking to make sure that requests make sense.)

I believe the best answer to this that we are going to get is automation. The script I have been developing allows me to remove blue links and sort link lists across all of the RA pages in about half an hour. [It still takes a while since I manually approve all edits to avoid parsing mistakes]. By freeing up editors from the most mundane of maintainence tasks, it should allow more time for a) actually making contributions and b) looking through the RA pages and eliminating requests that don't make sense or are redundant with existing articles.

Would it be better if I and others looked at every blue link before removing it, maybe, but the scope of the RA problem is such that it just isn't practical. Even if I did look at the pages, at best I would be unlikely to catch any but the most obvious vandals and copyvios, which are just as likely to be caught the first time an editor with an interest in the subject looks at the page. So in practical terms, I consider the burden on an editor's time to check those links is disproportionally large compared to the short-term benefit. If there was a large group of people actively interested in maintaining RA, this might be different, but the growth and turn over in RA has been significantly larger than the increase in people willing to keep it up. Since there is very little (or no) manual checking at present, I can't really be making the situation any worse. Personally, I think it is more important for the utility of RA to get past the mundane maintainence tasks and free up time for thinking about whether the requests people are making actually make sense.

If you have any thoughts on how to improve the process, I would be happy to hear them. Dragons flight 22:10, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Minor edit

Hi Dragon's Flight, I have a minor suggestion to improve the process. Noticed your bot deleted quite a lot of links from Wikipedia:Articles requested for more than a year, presumably as they'd been bluelinked. Yet it marked the change as minor. I'm pretty sure only typos, grammar, puntuation etc should be marked as minor, with any addition or removal of next not. See Wikipedia:Minor edit. Perhaps you could change it to not mark its changes as minor. Proto t c 1 July 2005 08:47 (UTC)

By default in pywikipedia robot framework, all bot edits are considered minor. I will look into this though. Dragons flight July 1, 2005 14:12 (UTC)

Predisposition

I started a page for predisposition. It needs more work. I'm out of time. --Memenen 3 July 2005 17:46 (UTC)

Redirects

Currently, it appears that your bot is deleting blue links to redirects. I put the L-theory link on requested articles as a request essentially to remove the redirect and write an article in its place. I am not an admin, so I don't think it is possible to delete the redirect without a VfD process, and it would be easier if the bot could automatically detect when the blue link is to a redirect and skip over the deletion of such a link from the requested articles page. Thank you for your consideration. - Gauge 18:47, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

The use of requested articles for redirects is discouraged, since if the redirect is appropriate then relevant content ought to already exist at the target page. That said, people do add redirects anyway. My bot will ignore any link on requested articles that is followed by the word "redirect" (the downside is that these will have to be checked by hand to see if the article has been written). The usual form that this takes is something like "[[foobar]] (currently redirects to [[golf club]])", but any method of including the phrase "redirect" will prevent it from being removed automatically (same with the keyword "copyvio"). It is neccesary that redirects be marked as such on WP:RA because human editors are just as likely as my bot to indiscriminately remove blue links.

Actually, if you want to delete a redirect that you feel is inappropriate, the place to do it is WP:RFD. However, you can always just start editting the page and replace it with the start of a new article. Dragons flight 19:23, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

Corruption

The RABot appears to have added the text "Loui" to the beginning of Wikipedia:Requested articles/Culture and fine arts. It looks like it may have moved it from somewhere else in the article. See [1] Pburka 02:52, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing that out, though I presently have no idea how it happened. Dragons flight 03:25, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

RABot, where are you?

Haven't seen any action from RABot in a while. My policy has been not to remove a blue link when I make a requested article, because RABot will be along. Do I need to change that way of thinking? I understand RABot is currently run manually; is that necessary? It could be set to run every night at a specified time. --Trovatore 22:34, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

The RABot's operator, i.e. me, is very busy in real life and has little time for wikipedia right now. As a result the RABot is running only every 3-7 days right now, but it does still exist. It can't be run fully automatically because unfortunately random requestors are more creative than I am and still managed to come up with some really strange request formats that trip up the bot and have to be corrected by hand. The RABot still makes it easy to deal with this (taking perhaps 15 minutes to cover all the request pages), but there does still have to be an intelligence in back to keep things working right. Dragons flight 05:29, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Removal Request

Could you please remove, David L Cook from the RABot violation (section). It has been more than 30 days and the article is still blue. Thank you

User:RABot/Stats

Could you please take a look at that page? There is 2 Mathematics entry in the table, both link to same page and both show completely different stats. Thank you. TestPilot 17:59, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

They changed the capitalization of the math page name, which messed up the list, but I haven't had the time to fix it. Dragons flight 19:00, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Are you missing a page?

Wikipedia:Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences/Medicine has been split from the Applied arts and sciences page, and doesn't seem to be covered by RABot.

Also--thanks for your very useful work. Terrace4 16:34, 29 May 2006 (UTC)