User:CommonsNotificationBot

CommonsNotificationBot
This user is a bot
(talk · contribs)
BOT	CommonsNotification (r97) is offline as of 2012-06-26 17:50
DEV	CommonsNotification (dev) is offline as of 2011-08-24 11:31
Operator	ErrantX (t)
Author	ErrantX
Approved?	Initial Approval; Task Extension Approval
Flagged?	No
Task(s)	Monitoring Commons for image deletions
Edit rate	Various
Edit period(s)	Constant
Automatic or manual?	Automatic
Programming language(s)	Python
Exclusion compliant?	No
Source code published?	found here
Emergency shutoff-compliant?	Yes

This user account is a bot that uses pyWikipediabot, operated by ErrantX (talk). It is used to make repetitive automated or semi-automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually, in accordance with the bot policy. The bot is approved and currently active – the relevant request for approval can be seen here.
Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.

CommonsNotificationBot is a bot designed to inform Wikipedia users of actions occurring on Wikimedia Commons, such as deletions. These can impact heavily on Wikipedia articles (either through the deletion of widely used images or by leaving articles with dead images). There is no established process for Commons admins (who are stretched anyway) to notify projects using images being deleted, an action that can have significant impact here.

The initial functionality is very basic; it watches for certain deletion related events and tries to inform people with the ability to fix any potential issues (like, replacing the image or performing a local redirect).

As of August 2011 the bot also runs across English Wikipedia file deletion categories.

What does the Bot watch for?

Current CommonsNotification bot checks for:

Commons
- Speedy deletion nominations
- Normal deletion nominations
- commons:Category:Media without a source
- Deletion of files
English Wikipedia
- Category:Candidates for speedy deletion (file related)

Where does the Bot place notifications?

For nominations:

If the image is used on less than 50 articles and less than 75 pages in total then a notification will be placed on the talk page of all articles containing the image (note: a notification will not be placed on any non-article talk pages).
If the image is used on more than 50 articles or more than 75 pages in total then a notification will be placed only on WP:VPM.

For deletions:

Logs to Wikipedia:Commons Deletions
If the image is used on more than 50 articles or more than 75 pages in total then a notification will be placed only on WP:VPM.

What should I do?

If the bot has placed a notice on an article talk page you are watching there are a number of things you could do...

If the image has been deleted

Remove the deleted image reference from the article text (this may already have been done by another bot)
Find a new image to replace the deleted one

If the image has been nominated for speedy deletion

If you think the CSD has not been met (note: Commons CSD is different to ours here) contest the deletion
Otherwise try to find a replacement image

If the image has been flagged on the Village Pump or Administrators Noticeboard

Check for the type of usage in articles (from my current testing it looks like it is mostly images used in infoboxes have this level of usage)
If the deletion of the image will cause a problem, try to fix it:
- Using a local redirect
- My modifying the usage of the image (i.e. in the infobox example) to use a different file
- Contact someone at commons to delay deletion or work out a plan to overcome issues with the deletion

A note on Commons CSD

The Speedy deletion process on Wikimedia Commons is a slower process to that on Wikipedia. It can take up to several days for a speedy deletion request to be fulfilled. So there is no rush to remove or replace images when they are nominated. You have time to find a placement.

Bot changelog

Key

b=beta
r=release
=production bot
=development bot
=future/proposed

b00	2011-05-04	- First release for trial run. Checks for deletions and speedy nominations Posts notifications to article talk & central locations
b52	2011-05-06	- Major code clean up Added a test/development mode ticket Fixed a number of bugs A full fix for the ongoing encoded chars problem ticket Introducing botconfig.py Only places notifications on talk pages if it thinks none already exists
b52a	2011-05-08	- Bot no longer places deletion notifications on article talk pages, per discussion (quick fix to get things working while dev is ongoing)
b65	2011-05-09	- New tracking & tweaks based on feedback Bot status page (to show online/offline status of production/development bots) Cleaner tracking of locally uploaded files Added a check to make sure all image revisions were deleted at commons (request) ticket Added a new way to track processed images (mostly for when the bot restarts) using a seperate machine-readable page rather than the human-readable log Bot no longer notifies article talk pages upon deletion of images - instead it will only centrally notify about widely used images (per request) ticket Add notifo notifications to Bot operator when it crashes ticket Bot tries to "fail gracefully" and update the status page on crashing ticket
r71	2011-05-16	- Bot tweaked & approved Changed username to CommonsNotificationBot Expanded checked categories slightly for "production" version No longer notifies WP:AN per request.
r71a	2011-05-17	- Temporarily disabling monitoring of CSD Flickr categories due to strange behaviour of the Commons Flickr bot
r73	2011-05-26	- Expand what the bot tracks Bot now tracks deletion requests on commons (ticket)
r78	2011-05-31	- Some fixes and improvements to reduce the amount of edits made Fixed a minor error on the /log page where the = symbol in URI's broke the template display (ticket) Store the tracking log locally, only save it on-wiki hourly (to reduce user space edits) (ticket)
r79	2011-06-01	- Tweaks & bug fix Fixed a bug where the tracking log was not clearing old entries.. and grew and grew! (ticket) Increase tracking log save time to every 2 hrs
r82	2011-06-29	- Tracking unsourced Bot now tracks commons:Category:Media_without_a_source (ticket)
r91	2011-08-22	- Expanded functionality Improved edit summary (ticket) Monitor English Wikipedia file CSD categories (ticket, BRFA)
r92	2011-08-24	- Consolidated Notifications A "messy hack" to let the bot consolidate multiple notifications on some pages (ticket)
r97	2011-11-30	- Bug fixes Enable multi/condensed notifications for commons as well (ticket) Fixing issue with templates in tracking log (ticket)