Wikipedia:Full-date unlinking bot

Background

• The present wording of MOSNUM, confirmed by a recent RFC, guides that years ("1795") and month-day combinations ("February 24") should not be linked unless their target article content is germane and topical to the subject of the article with the link. Such links should share an important connection with that subject other than that the events occurred on the same date. For example, editors should not link the date (or year) in a sentence such as (from Sydney Opera House): "The Sydney Opera House was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 28 June 2007", because little, if any, of the contents of either June 28 or 2007 are germane to either UNESCO, a World Heritage Site, or the Sydney Opera House.
• That RFC, and several RFCs last year, also showed clear support for dispensing with the old system of autoformatting, a practice which is no longer recommended on the English Wikipedia. Date-autoformatting was piggybacked onto the wikilinking system with links such as [[8 December]] [[2002]] and [[December 8]], [[2002]].
• Many articles now do not use date-autoformatting, but several hundred thousand still have the vestiges of the old system. This creates unnecessary irrelevant links.
• Because of a dispute over how this community view should be implemented, and due to the arduous task of removing all the the double square brackets manually, this proposal is that an automatic process (a bot) should remove them in a carefully controlled way.
• This proposal does not preclude any future method of date autoformatting that does not require links.

The details of the proposal

1. The bot will unlink only day-month-year (triple) combinations, such as [[5 November]] [[1989]] and [[November 5]], [[1989]]. It will turn January 15, 2005 into January 15, 2005.
2. Links of solitary years ([[1989]]) and solitary month-days ([[November 5]], [[5 November]]), and links such as 1983 in film will not be removed by this bot.
3. Intrinsically chronological articles (such as 1789, January, and 1940s) would not be treated by the bot.
4. Each article will be edited only once by the bot while performing this task. If the edit is reverted it will not be retreated by the bot.
5. The bot will follow normal bot exclusion rules using the {{bots}} and {{nobots}} templates.
6. An exclusion list will contain the articles that the bot will not edit. This list will contain the few "false positives" where linking to month-day-year (triples) is appropriate. (If only one of the links is good, then it is easier to edit the page directly, remove the bad link, and the bot will leave the good one.) Articles will be added to the list after manual review, however there will be no indiscriminate mass-adding of articles to the exclusion list. The list will be openly editable, and will be available for one month before the bot starts running.
7. The bot will also fix some uncontroversial errors, such as missing commas and spaces.
8. The bot operator must be responsive and civil to anyone who has questions or complaints about the bot. The bot user page and talk page will describe its task and function in respectful language.
9. The bot operator will be someone who has not edit-warred or been uncivil in relation to date links.
10. If a problem is discovered, or the bot operator is unable to keep up with questions, the bot will be paused until the issues are resolved.
11. The source code of the bot will be available to the community.
12. The implementation of the bot will be subject to approval by the Bot Approvals Group.