Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ArmadilloProcessBot

ArmadilloProcessBot

Manually Assisted:Yes

Programming Language(s): Pywikipedia framework

Function Summary:To scan through User pages listed in userbox/template categories - to make a list of user pages that should be edited to remove the template category/ies. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#User_pages_in_template_categories

Edit period(s) : As required, probably a few times a day until the problems as cleared up, then once or twice a month.

Edit rate requested: 6 edits per minute

Already has a bot flag (Y/N):N

Function Details: The initial version of the bot will not do any user page (or article) editing, just create a list to see what the possible workload is.

Discussion

So it crawls through a list of template categories and finds user pages? That seems like a lot of page requesting. Also, where does it get the list of template categories from?Voice-of-All 19:23, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please Make a suerpage for your bot. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:36, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry - the link was wrong --ArmadilloFromHell 20:58, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Starting at Category:User templates it would find all subcategories e.g. Category:Food user templates. In each of the categories and subcategories it would find entries beginning with User: (I'm only interested in top level User pages, as opposed to subpages) as opposed to Template: and create a unique list of those, together with a count of many times each is found. --ArmadilloFromHell 21:11, 12 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Im not sure you want to use python. Python has a bug with userpages. (I know I have pywiki) I would sugest AWB. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 13:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the suggestion, I just applied. However, I'm sure I tried it in the past and it would not work, but I'm on a new computer with a freshly installed WinXP so maybe it will be ok now. --ArmadilloFromHell 14:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is this task to "make a list", as it says above, or to actually remove the categories? If the former, I assume no bot-flag is require, and nor would it be making 6 edits per minutes (surely more like, one edit per run, if any). If the latter, please clarify. Alai 14:28, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Initially it was only to make a list, so for that maybe it does not need bot mode, but I assumed it would have to be throttled, so it doesn't go flying through all the template categories enumerating them. Once I see how much is involved, I may decide to make it a bot to do the user page changes. --ArmadilloFromHell 20:31, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some throttling is probably a good idea, but "reads" are much cheaper than "writes", and I don't think it would have to be restricted to six page-fetches per minute, if that's what you're proposing. OTOH, getting the list of candidates via the database dump is also an option. Alai 01:05, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

robots.txt used to throttle the page-read speed to sixty fetches per minute, but the devs removed the throttle recently. It's still a good guideline. --ais523 11:11, 15 November 2006 (U T C)

Sounds like a good idea (and a plausible ballpark number) to me. Alai 16:58, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've been playing with AWB, and have found there are in fact two distinct problems, the original one (as above), where users have added templates using subst: and failed to remove the categories, and a second one - some (unknown) number of templates have been created incorrectly and do not have noinclude around the category see User:ArmadilloProcess, I suspect the number of changes required to be signicantly less than originally estimated, e.g. fixing one template, fixes all users who have used the template. Can I use User:ArmadilloProcess (and not User:ArmadilloProcessBot) to run AWB to fix the templates without getting bot approval? I've done a couple of tests and changed one or two - see for example [1] --ArmadilloFromHell 04:19, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]