User talk:AussieBot

September 2019

Your account has been blocked from editing Wikipedia with this username. This is because your username, AussieBot, contains the suffix "-bot", which is generally reserved for authorized bot accounts.

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If you think that you were blocked in error, you may appeal this block by adding {{unblock|Your reason here}} below this notice, but you should read our guide to appealing blocks first. N.J.A. | talk 02:15, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Start Class changed to List Class

Hi @Hawkeye7, I noticed that the @AussieBot recently updated an article to List class, removing its previous Start class status. I plan to move it back to Start Class as it's not a list but just to avoid this in future... Is this a bug with the bot or a feature? For example, is there something in the article causing the bot to think the article is actually a list? Thanks for your help, ElfmanWriter (talk) 21:23, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have moved it back. In the case of lists, the bot has very little to go on, and when in doubt, assumes that if a human considered it to be a list, then it probably is one. Occasionally a human has made a mistake too. Unfortunately, not all list articles have "list" in their name. This article is a good example of how hard it is to deal with the border cases. I looks to the bot like a lot of tables. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:51, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks. It appears while the Irish football banner was set to Start Class, the Ireland banner was set to List Class. Definitely a human error in this case. But good to know the bot overwrote based on the Ireland banner which I would say is the correct hierarchy to follow! ElfmanWriter (talk) 22:56, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I actually think that if the conflict is between a list and not a list, then it should assign the other rank. I find most often the list one is incorrectly added. Gonnym (talk) 08:22, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

User:AussieBot/Conflicts/2025/August

Template transclusion limit has been reached so list is no longer displaying properly. Do you have any suggestions? Perhaps limit the list to the last 7 days? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:10, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I thought this might happen when I cranked up the number of articles processed. I will archive. manually. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:17, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:34, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Bot seems to have stopped completely now — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:57, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Hawkeye7 could you restart the bot please? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:43, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have made a change that I hope will restart it, but need another day before I can investigate what the problem is. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:08, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to have stopped again? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:01, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just to let you know that the bot has not run for 6 days now — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:54, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Bot seems to be struggling to run, and there are some strange reports on User:AussieBot/Conflicts/Errors — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:37, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am on top of the error messages. The Bot struggling to run was due to issues with Toolforge, which WMF has now resolved. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:19, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@MSGJ: what is bothering me is categories like Category:Start-Class articles conflicting with List-Class project-independent quality rating. The bot reported the category processed, and I verified this. However, it now contains eight pages. None of these are the result of recent changes. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:24, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just a job queue issue I believe. After 3 months these pages are still trickling into the tracking category. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:07, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think this bot should be systematically re-rating from start -> C class without human intervention

The updated ratings don't seem reliably accurate, re-rating from "start" to "c" doesn't seem that important or useful even if it were accurate, and having the bot do a bunch of them automatically seems like more trouble than it's worth. The behavior also doesn't accord with the request for approval, which claims the bot will "resolve conflicting quality ratings, setting it to stub or start depending on its rating in Liftwing." ("stub" or not seems like a marginally easier call to make, since it is mostly about content length rather than a quality assessment) –jacobolus (t) 02:35, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

C class was added during the BRFA discussion. The idea is to clean up the contradictory ratings. I have limited the size of the daily runs to keep disruption down. Liftwing is used to determine whether an article is Stub, Start or C class. All have been rated by a human at least once, so the Bot's job is to pick the most appropriate one. As you say, the difference between Start and C may not be too significant, but the Start range is quite wide. Most C class articles could be improved to B with a little effort. I checked a few articles like Ron Yosef, and it is indeed is a C. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:05, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Most C class articles could be improved to B with a little effort" – if by "little" you mean a few days of work, then sure. –jacobolus (t) 03:17, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, for some value of "a little effort". In the case of the example I picked, Ron Yosef, all it needs is footnotes for the three unreferenced paragraphs. How much effort that would actually be I don't really know. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:21, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the bot has enough context or the right decision-making criteria to make an informed decision. The bot isn't doing some kind of deep search of the literature about a topic and then deciding how complete, neutral, accessible, well illustrated, etc. our coverage is. Instead it's presumably looking at completely superficial features like word count, number of footnotes, resemblance of the style to other articles, etc.

Making an automatic rating on those grounds is, in my opinion, not appropriate. The ratings are already substantially arbitrary, but at least have some kind of human thought behind them. This is a job that doesn't urgently need to be done, and it is fine to leave to humans to do at their leisure (or just left alone in the mean time).

FWIW, I don't personally know enough about Ron Yosef to judge our article's merits. –jacobolus (t) 03:26, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that there are 32,000 articles with conflicting ratings. And at the Stub/Start/C level, articles do not need to be referenced, complete, neutral, accessible or well illustrated. All articles should be, but such an article would be B class at a minimum. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:25, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would recommend the bot should decide stub/not and beyond that should keep the top-level rating (rather than the project-specific one) when they conflict. (Though frankly, it really isn't a serious problem having conflicting ratings.) –jacobolus (t) 06:41, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Jacobolus, do you have any actual examples of where the bot has made a mistake? I have reviewed many of the bot's edits and not found anything that concerns me. Unless you are personally willing to help review all the C-class conflicts then I suggest we let the bot get on with it ... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:41, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Concentric spheres definitely should not be "C", as an example. Nor should Zome (architecture) in my opinion. Even calling Graphics software "start" class seems generous; I think it could be fairly defended as still a "stub". –jacobolus (t) 08:38, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

But anyway, why do you think all of the "conflicts" must be immediately reviewed? Why does it matter if these miscellaneous neglected crummy articles sit with 2 ratings on them? It seems utterly harmless and not worth fretting about, and believing that a bot "fixing" this will make any practical improvement to the project seems like a significant misunderstanding. The problem with these articles is that a person hasn't bothered to put significant work into improving them, not that they weren't rated properly. –jacobolus (t) 08:43, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed; putting work into improving the articles is what is required. (Although people should not be creating starts and stubs in 2025.) By definition, there is a difference of opinion over the quality of the articles being processed (although the differing ratings may reflect assessment at different times). Concentric spheres is definitely a C-class; it could rate a B as it is fully referenced. Graphics software is start and not a stub, because it has an image and structure. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:41, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

people should not be creating starts and stubs in 2025 – most articles start this way, and people absolutely should be adding more in 2025, if a topic is encyclopedic. –jacobolus (t) 20:45, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Concentric spheres is very much a "start", basically a quick detail-free description of the concept without depth; the current sources are fine, it just doesn't try to cover the content of those sources. Graphics software doesn't even scratch the surface of the topic, and is much closer to a stub than an article. –jacobolus (t) 20:48, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The conflicts need to be resolved, because the community decided to abolish project-specific ratings in February 2023 (see WP:PIQA for more details). They have not been removed immediately - it has taken more than 2 years to get to this point! And yes, there is benefit to resolving all these conflicts, because the templates can then be changed to prevent any project-specific ratings from being added, so the issue will be solved for good. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:57, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A mistake in this diff: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Cytidine_monophosphate&diff=next&oldid=1206855742 -- A stub turned in the a C class, when the rating for chemicals should have been deleted, as stub is more appropriate.

Also in this diff it changed stub to C in an unjustified way. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:57, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yikes! That was an error. I have corrected it. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:19, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Would it be worth preventing the bot from rating an article higher than the highest human-given rating? In other words, if an article has been rated as Start and Stub, then the bot should choose between those classes but will not go higher than Start. This might allay any editors' concerns that the bot is rating without human involvement. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:00, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The problem has been resolved, but I see no reason not to add this as an additional check. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:58, 18 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I've noticed some recent changes of the rating to C-class in album articles where the conflict in the project banner rating is a stub vs start. Here's one example. Forgive me if this has already been resolved. Thanks. Starcheerspeaksnewslostwars^{Talk to me} 03:05, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The problem has been resolved but I have to prepare a run to correct these. Thanks for reporting!

Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:07, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Really really tiny nitpick

[1] should have turned {{WikiProject Computer Security |class=Start}} into {{WikiProject Computer Security}}, not {{WikiProject Computer Security }} (notice the trailing whitespace.) Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 04:04, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Assigning stubs as C-class

Hi, please stop the bot and change the logic to avoid articles like these being assigned C class. Talk page rating 1 article 1 at that time Talk page rating 2 article 2 at that time C 679 03:17, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Already done. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:03, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Rough run on WikiProject Shopping Centers articles

Not sure if this has been covered by the post above, but I went through a run done by the bot on 29 articles related to WikiProject Shopping Centers. 15 needed reassessment, with 3 others being in a gray zone of what the correct assessment was. Five were off by at least two levels, those being Clifton Park Center, Fort Worth Design District, Glendale Fashion Center, Gold Souk Grande Mall Chennai, and Hyderabad Central. Don't know if this feedback is helpful. Esw01407 (talk) 14:32, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]