Wikipedia:Bot requests

For the policy on bot requirements, see WP:BOTREQUIRE.

This is a page for requesting tasks to be done by bots per the bot policy. This is an appropriate place to put ideas for uncontroversial bot tasks, to get early feedback on ideas for bot tasks (controversial or not), and to seek bot operators for bot tasks. Consensus-building discussions requiring large community input (such as request for comments) should normally be held at WP:VPPROP or other relevant pages (such as a WikiProject's talk page).

You can check the "Commonly Requested Bots" box above to see if a suitable bot already exists for the task you have in mind. If you have a question about a particular bot, contact the bot operator directly via their talk page or the bot's talk page. If a bot is acting improperly, follow the guidance outlined in WP:BOTISSUE. For broader issues and general discussion about bots, see the bot noticeboard.

Before making a request, please see the list of frequently denied bots, either because they are too complicated to program, or do not have consensus from the Wikipedia community. If you are requesting that a template (such as a WikiProject banner) is added to all pages in a particular category, please be careful to check the category tree for any unwanted subcategories. It is best to give a complete list of categories that should be worked through individually, rather than one category to be analyzed recursively (see example difference).

Alternatives to bot requests

• WP:AWBREQ, for simple tasks that involve a handful of articles and/or only needs to be done once (e.g. adding a category to a few articles).
• WP:URLREQ, for tasks involving changing or updating URLs to prevent link rot (specialized bots deal with this).
• WP:USURPREQ, for reporting a domain be usurped eg. |url-status=usurped
• WP:SQLREQ, for tasks which might be solved with an SQL query (e.g. compiling a list of articles according to certain criteria).
• WP:TEMPREQ, to request a new template written in wiki code or Lua.
• WP:SCRIPTREQ, to request a new user script. Many useful scripts already exist, see Wikipedia:User scripts/List.
• WP:CITEBOTREQ, to request a new feature for WP:Citation bot, a user-initiated bot that fixes citations.

Note to bot operators: The {{BOTREQ}} template can be used to give common responses, and make it easier to keep track of the task's current status. If you complete a request, note that you did with {{BOTREQ|done}}, and archive the request after a few days (WP:1CA is useful here).

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Please add your bot requests to the bottom of this page.
Make a new request

#	Bot request	Status	💬	👥	🙋 Last editor	🕒 (UTC)	🤖 Last botop editor	🕒 (UTC)
1	Create and maintain a page that shows the top Wikipedia pages by views and edits		7	5	76.81.111.3	2025-10-31 02:14	GalStar	2025-08-25 06:00
2	List-defined references format		21	8	Usernamekiran	2025-10-19 15:02	Usernamekiran	2025-10-19 15:02
3	Automatically fix Category:CS1 maint: article number as page number	Done	4	4	Headbomb	2025-10-20 11:40	Headbomb	2025-10-20 11:40
4	Massive change of sortkeys from East Timor to Timor-Leste		2	2	Anomie	2025-09-24 22:24	Anomie	2025-09-24 22:24
5	Bot to replace BR tags with list tempaltes		3	3	Jonesey95	2025-09-27 12:09	Anomie	2025-09-26 13:51
6	Decap "External Links"		3	2	Qwerfjkl	2025-10-14 08:06	Qwerfjkl	2025-10-14 08:06
7	Regularly update social media statistics		12	4	Primefac	2025-10-19 20:36	Primefac	2025-10-19 20:36
8	;notes -> boldface		21	6	Isaacl	2025-10-21 16:30	Headbomb	2025-10-21 15:15
9	Public transit redirects		5	3	Anomie	2025-10-21 21:21	Anomie	2025-10-21 21:21

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In the last hour
In the last day
In the last week
In the last month
More than one month
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When exceptions occur, please check the setting first.

Create and maintain a page that shows the top Wikipedia pages by views and edits

I'd be interested in a few separate Wikipedia lists that are maintained by a bot once every 24 hours. I will go into detail on which each list should do.

• Information for "Wikipedia:Bot requests" - Wikipedia

1. The first list should include the most viewed pages. While I understand that pages with the most viewed articles exist, I would like to see a bot-maintained list that includes pages not in mainspace. I would like to know what the top viewed pages are that are not articles but seems to be very limited information on this. If you go into the page information section of this page, the area of the page I'm focused on is Page views in the past 30 days. If someone can figure this out, that would be great.
2. In the edit history section of the page, I would like to see the top articles by Total number of edits, Recent number of edits (within past 30 days), as well as Recent number of distinct authors. The information on this is very limited outside of article pages, but I would like to see a maintained list of this.

The reason why I would like a bot to analyze these things is because I would like to analyze not only article traffic, but also pages that are not articles like in Projectspace and the Talk pages so that when I make changes to Wikipedia, since it is built for readers and to a lesser extent, editors it would be good to see how traffic like on the Teahouse compares to other pages. Please ping me when done. Thank you. Interstellarity (talk) 21:16, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

For #2, see WP:Database reports/Pages with the most revisions * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:55, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

Yes, I was aware of that page, but I didn't think about that when making the request. I think we are good on the total number of edits, so no need to create a new bot for that. It's just the other stuff I'm asking about. Interstellarity (talk) 22:01, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

You should be able to write a SQL query to do this without a bot. GalStar (talk) (contribs) 06:00, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

In the edit history section of the page I'm not sure what you mean by that, but:

• Page views in the past 30 days: /media/api/rest_v1/metrics/pageviews/top/en.wikipedia/all-access/2025/08/all-days
• Recent number of edits (within past 30 days): https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/97203 (excludes categories)
• Total number of edits: WP:Database reports/Pages with the most revisions
• Distinct authors in 30 days: https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/97202

The quarry ones I can make a bot to add to WP:Database Reports Scaledish! Talkish? Statish. 05:43, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

• Distinct authors in 30 days: Wikipedia:Database reports/Pages with the most distinct editors in the last month

 Partly done The other ones are mildly covered by other bots or not a conventional database report so I didn't do them. Scaledish! Talkish? Statish. 06:40, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

See WP:MOSTEDITED. 76.81.111.3 (talk) 02:14, 31 October 2025 (UTC)

List-defined references format

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T356471

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T399937

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52896

Proposing a bot that replaces {{reflist|refs= ... }} with <references> ... </references>

The reason is that there are issues with list-defined references that are based on the template reflist. The VisualEditor can't parse references (and more broadly HTML tags) that are inside templates. This is apparently a design choice, it has been like this for around 10 years and isn't going to change. It means that in the VisualEditor, list-defined references that are within a reflist template can't be modified, and are not displayed (you instead get the message "This reference is defined in a template or other generated block, and for now can only be previewed in source mode"). However, the parsing works with list-defined references that use the <references> template.

There was a long discussion on this a few months ago, here of one of the paragraphs of the closing comment:

"There was 2:1 support in favor of deprecating {{reflist|refs=}} and replacing existing instances. I updated the linked documentation pages to do so. Someone will need to write a bot and follow the procedure at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval. At least one editor had concerns about bots making incorrect edits. There was also discussion of whether or not such changes should be bot-flagged so they don't show up on watchlists, and whether it should be required that other changes be made at the same time. The bot approval process is designed to take these concerns into account and balance them against the proposed benefits; that would be the place to raise them. (It might be helpful if whoever makes the requests notifies the editors who participated in this discussion.)"

Doing this change wasn't expected to significantly impact reference lists rendering, besides making them more VisualEditor-friendly. But there can be instances where the template reflist is used with additional arguments, in which case it may be good to double-check that the rendering remains approximately the same when using <references>. Also note that what is inside "..." in {{reflist|refs= ... }} can contain nested templates, so the parsing required to implement the bot could potentially be tricky. Here is an example of what this kind of edit looks like. If I had to guess, I would say that around 5% of Wikipedia articles would be affected. Alenoach (talk) 04:18, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

"There was 2:1 support in favor of deprecating {{reflist|refs=}} and replacing existing instances"

I don't see that at all in the discussion, I see closer to 1:1 (3 oppose, 3 support). {{Reflist}} is used on virtually all articles (6.3M pages). A decision letting a bot run on millions of articles (even 5% of that would be 315K pages) needs a much, much stronger consensus than an even split between 6 people. Especially when the saner solution seems to fix VE. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:03, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

A naive search gives 55,000 articles. A slightly more complex search times out at 56,500. — Qwerfjkltalk 12:19, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

And let's face it, VE is probably never going to get fixed. The devs who might are too busy working on shiny new features instead. But I do agree that this really should have an RFC at WP:VPR (and advertised on WP:CENT) before a BRFA, the lightly attended RFC linked is too small to prevent people freaking out over "local consensus". I'd also recommend recruiting the people who participated the linked RFC to draft a strong statement for the new one, pre-addressing the many misconceptions already seen in the linked RFC, rather than jumping straight to a half-baked RFC that will drown in those misconceptions. Anomie⚔ 15:06, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

The change would be just for when the "refs" parameter is used. Maybe one additional safety precaution would be to apply the change only when "refs" is the only parameter to the template {{reflist}}. That would likely still cover most of the instances of the problem, and leave the more tricky cases where reflist has a combinations of parameters.

In the discussion, the initial discussion about discouraging list-defined references did not get consensus, but the later discussion about specifically replacing {{reflist|refs= ... }} did get much more support. The main objection was from Gawaon about the flexibility of {{reflist}} to have parameters like colwidth, but he eventually agreed with the proposal, and I guess limiting the change to when only the parameter "refs" is used would address his remaining concern.

Is it worth people's time to have an advertised RFC about on this technical topic? If option 1 is not changing anything, should option 2 be about changing if "refs" is the only parameter, or changing if "refs" is among the parameter to {{reflist}}? Alenoach (talk) 15:25, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Is it worth people's time to have an advertised RFC about on this technical topic? Yes, because it will save a lot of time later where people would otherwise complain about "local consensus" and that they weren't consulted. Anomie⚔ 15:46, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there was no consensus whatsoever to have all instances of {{reflist}} replaced. The discussion was specifically about the refs= parameter. Gawaon (talk) 17:10, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

The monthly parameter usage report for Template:Reflist suggests that there are 183,000 articles using |refs=. It seems like any sort of replacement would need to start with a well-advertised RFC that successfully deprecated |refs=. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:39, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

That has already happened, see the closing comment of the linked discussion. Now it just needs to be implemented. Gawaon (talk) 06:51, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

Interesting. I wonder what explains the difference with the 55,000 returned by Qwerfjkl's search. Alenoach (talk) 02:35, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

Note there's now a discussion opened at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Bot to make list-defined references editable with the VisualEditor. Anomie⚔ 11:30, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

The discussion was automatically archived by a bot. The consensus was clear, although there hasn't been a formal closure message. Alenoach (talk) 17:32, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

@Alenoach: If I am reading the discussion correctly, the only change required is to replace {{reflist|refs= ... }} with <references> ... </references> when the reflist template has only one parameter named refs. I am available and can file a BRFA. – DreamRimmer ■ 17:08, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm assuming most of the time there is only the refs parameter and it would be the simplest option. But if there is a safe replacement for additional parameters, which does not affect the rendering, it would be even better, and the importance of being able to handle additional parameters depends on how many occurrences there are. This link provided by Jonesey95 suggests that the most common parameter besides refs is group, for which <references> has a direct equivalent (although refs and group probably often don't occur together, it's likely worth handling if not too complex). The bot is not required to be exhaustive, and other parameters seem rare. I guess that the rest can be ignored or changed manually if it's more convenient.

The bot should however not change anything if the reflist has no refs parameter (some people insisted for doing that as well, and it would make sense, but that was not the primary topic of the RFC and it's unclear whether there would be consensus). Alenoach (talk) 18:20, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

Uses with |1=2 or |1=30em (with or without the explicit 1=) or |colwidth=30em should be safe to ignore those parameters, unless there are 10 or fewer references in the article. Uses with |1=1 (or probably things like |1=100% or |colwidth=100%) should be safe to replace with <references responsive=0 />. Other values for those parameters would likely result in a change in rendering. at least those that are valid for CSS column-count or column-width; if someone did something like |colwidth=bogus we could probably go with <references responsive=0 />.

Certain values of |group= (upper-alpha, upper-roman, lower-alpha, lower-greek, lower-roman) will currently result in different rendering. It would be possible to work around this, either by adding some rules to MediaWiki:Common.css or some TemplateStyles stylesheet we'd include into pages when <references group="one-of-those" /> is used.

|liststyle= with one of those values will almost always result in changed rendering, unless someone is doing something redundant like {{reflist|group=lower-alpha|liststyle=lower-alpha}}.

Any other parameters should be safe to ignore, as the above are all I see used by {{reflist}}. Anomie⚔ 23:15, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

@Anomie: Can you help me with the final replacements? Your explanation was clear, but I want to be sure because I have not worked with these much and I want to avoid causing any rendering issues, so I would appreciate it if you could list the replacements to make. – DreamRimmer ■ 16:26, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

There's not exactly a "list of replacements" to make, at least not to my way of thinking. I'd think about it in terms of looking at the parameters to the {{reflist}} and deciding what to do based on that, more or less as I described. Anomie⚔ 17:40, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

Alright, I am filing a BRFA to process the pages where the reflist has only the refs parameter. Once that is complete, I will file another BRFA to fix the additional parameters as per your suggested fix. – DreamRimmer ■ 15:18, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

• after some refs being added, the {{reflist}} was deactivated in this version special:permalink/1317616753. Was this because of the issue being discussed in this discussion? I temporarily fixed it with this edit, but second look is requested. —usernamekiran (talk) 02:46, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  No, the problem in that article is because it's hitting WP:PEIS. Anomie⚔ 11:58, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

  thanks. —usernamekiran (talk) 15:02, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

Automatically fix Category:CS1 maint: article number as page number

The rules that create this error seem straightforward enough to also automatically fix with a couple regex tests. Citation Bot catches some but not all of them, but since there's currently 40k+ instances of this error, waiting for a human to ask Citation Bot to check seems like a waste of time. ~ฅ(ↀωↀ=)neko-chan^nyan 16:38, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Not an error category. cs1|2 adds this category and emits a maintenance message when it detects a value in a {{cite journal}} |page(s)= parameter that is probably an article-number. cs1|2 maintenance messages are hidden from everyone who has not enabled maintenance message display; see Help:CS1 errors § Controlling error message display. A {{cite journal}} template using |page= renders with a colon (:) preceding the page number; a template using |article-number= omits the colon.

Because the removal of a colon is more-or-less unnoticeable and because maintenance messages are hidden by default, I suspect that editors are likely to view such edits as WP:COSMETICBOT edits and demand that the bot be shut down.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:19, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

WP:COSMETICBOT is a clear line, the colon is sufficient. And the removal of the maintenance categories would fall under the "administration of the encyclopedia" bullet too. OTOH, just because it's not WP:COSMETICBOT doesn't mean that a bot to do it would automatically be allowed, just like it's possible that a bot can be approved for cosmetic edits if the community supports those edits. Anomie⚔ 15:05, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

 Done through Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Monkbot 21. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:40, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Massive change of sortkeys from East Timor to Timor-Leste

Hello,

A number of articles and categories were renamed last year from East Timor to Timor-Leste, following this move discussion. However many articles and categories still have category sortkeys with the old name, ending up being sorted wrong.

The following needs to be performed (example):

• In all articles and categories with a name containing Timor-Leste:
• Look for: [[Category:<string>|East<string>]]
  • Replace it by: [[Category:<string>|Timor-Leste]]
• Also look for: {{DEFAULTSORT:East<string>}}
  • Replace it by: {{DEFAULTSORT:Timor-Leste}}

Place Clichy (talk) 21:55, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

It appears there are 248 81 pages (248 total category listings) with "Timor-Leste" in the name and "East" in a category sortkey: quarry:query/97449. Might be better for WP:AWBREQ instead of here, or maybe it could be done manually. Anomie⚔ 22:24, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Bot to replace BR tags with list tempaltes

So it was recently brought to my attention that per the MOS breaks are discouraged for lists. So what about a bot that cleans up lists, particularly those in Infoboxes… I try to do it whenever I stumble across them (see this diff for example), but this seems like it could be ripe for automation. While somewhat WP:COSMETIC, I know that break tags cause issues on the backend that templates like {{unbulleted list}} do not. —Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 09:01, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

{{unbulleted list}} is said to generate HTML that produces a better result for screen readers than <br> tags, so it wouldn't be WP:COSMETIC. OTOH, I wonder whether this may turn out to be a WP:CONTEXTBOT. Anomie⚔ 13:51, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Each of these edits needs to be considered carefully to see if it will cause Linter errors. Changing infobox parameter values from inline text using br tags to div-based text can cause div tags to be wrapped by span tags, which is a type of high-priority Linter error that we have completely cleared from Wikipedia; there were over 160,000 such errors at this time in 2018. The issue can sometimes be fixed by modifying the infobox to use div tags as wrappers, but not always, IIRC. – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:09, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Decap "External Links"

Decap "External Links" to "External links". Here is the search code (insource:/==External Links==/) I was just going to fix them with JWB but there are quite a lot. At least 7,900, possibly more. Here is the code with different spacing as well (insource:/== External Links ==/) That will generate a different set of results that also need fixing. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 00:29, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

WikiOriginal-9, 16,000 (regex times out). — Qwerfjkltalk 08:05, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Though this seems fairly trivial, so maybe just add to RegExTypoFix and forget about it? — Qwerfjkltalk 08:06, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Regularly update social media statistics

So I'm currently working on {{Infobox social media personality}}. Had a thought for a bot. Basically there is a need to keep the viewer/follower/subscriber counts up to date to avoid WP:ASOF issues. Seems like prime duty for a weekly or monthly bot? YouTube certainly has an API. Documentation here shows you can get viewer and subscriber counts fairly easily. I'm sure Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, etc. have something similar. Anyway, I'm not doing bot work at present but if anyone was interested in taking this on I'd be happy to collaborate! --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:17, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

I'd be more inclined to remove this information entirely. Everything other than the order of magnitude isn't really what Wikipedia is supposed to be for. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 00:23, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

@Pppery: all I will say is that in the discussions relating to the merge of the various social media templates {{infobox TikTok personality}}, {{Infobox Instagram personality}} etc that occurred at this TFD and in the discussions on Template talk:Infobox social media personality, there was overwhelming support for keeping these statistics. There was a lot removed (such as the youtube creator awards, associated acts, and a few other things. But viewer/follower/subscriber count was deemed an important metric for WP:NOTABILITY. Personally I could go either way. WP:CONSENSUS seems to be to keep it and IF it is going to stay, I think it is important to keep it up to date. You mention order of magnitude... I am in favor of a less specific number (i.e. 320 million vs 320,432,584) which I think is inline with what you mean by order of magnitude. In any case, if you feel strongly about removing them, please join the discussion on the talk page. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 05:05, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

My point is that once you only say "300 million" then that number is sufficiently static that you shouldn't need a bot. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 05:50, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

So that is totally valid. If the bot is just updating "300 million" to "304 million", then I totally agree not worth it. But as I've done these conversions I've come across pages that haven't had their stats updated in years. I spot checked a few out of curiousity, some haven't changed much, but some have wild fluctuations that do fall into the orders of magnitude.

I certainly don't envision this as a daily run bot, or even a weekly run. Maybe a monthly or even quarterly?

Is there any policy I'm missing that would make this an unacceptable bot or is your argument more of a "not worth the time and effort". Both are valid, just want to make sure I understand. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 08:10, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Zackmann08, I think running this on Wikidata and then pulling from there would be better, though using Wikidata on Wikipedia is controversial. — Qwerfjkltalk 08:57, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Funny story, I just stumbled across Module:YouTubeSubscribers which, at first glance, appears to do just that! I will say that still runs into the same problem of data getting stale. A bot would poll the API for YouTube, Instagram, etc. Pulling from Wikidata still relies on someone manually updating the stats, it just is manually updated on Wikidata instead of on Wikipedia. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 08:59, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Zackmann08, to be clear, repetitively updating stats edits would be more acceptable on Wikidata than on Wikipedia; there's no issues with clogging up edit history. — Qwerfjkltalk 09:11, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Cool. Appreciate the link to the previous bot request. I'll investigate importing stats from Wikidata. Looks like there is a Wikidata:Bot requests page too so I'll make a request there. Thanks much. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 09:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

See previous discussion Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 83#Bot to update follower/subscriber/view counts on relevant articles. — Qwerfjkltalk 09:01, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Awesome. Thanks for the link! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 09:04, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

I've said this before elsewhere, but if there is going to be a bot-related set of updates, it should be to a single module storing subscriber counts that {{Infobox social media personality}} calls; it would be one edit per week/month/quarter but would still allow for more accurate updating of any page calling it. Primefac (talk) 20:36, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

;notes -> boldface

Per mos:fakeheading, all ;Notes markup should be replaced with '''Notes''' (don't forget about adding one new line above if it's not immediately preceded by anything that is not a paragraph and adding one new line below if it's not immediately followed by anything that is not a paragraph). This is a quite common mistake, actually (21.8k articles). sapphaline (talk) 11:18, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

I've had a brainfart. Ignore this section. With apologies to sapphaline. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:48, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

{{archive now}} Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:30, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

This is not a trivial fix. It may appear like it is visually, but technically it's not. sapphaline (talk) 11:33, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

It is trivial in the sense that Bot operators do not need to be notified that there was a MOS:FAKEHEADING violation. Now let this be archived. {{resolved}} Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:35, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

It is trivial in the sense that Bot operators do not need to be notified that there was a MOS:FAKEHEADING violation - it is not trivial in the sense of Wikipedia:Bot_policy#Cosmetic_changes:

Changes that are typically considered substantive affect something visible to readers and consumers of Wikipedia, such as

• the output text or HTML in ways that make a difference to the audio or visual rendering of a page in web browsers, screen readers, when printed, in PDFs, or when accessed through other forms of assistive technology (e.g. removing a deleted category, updating a template parameter, removing blank lines from lists formatted in wikicode);

. sapphaline (talk) 11:37, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

We are not arguing about whether or not you should have done the edit, the edit was correct. As are millions of other edits on Wikipedia. We do not need a discussion about this specific edit. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:43, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't follow the double negatives above, but I suspect that this blanket task would run afoul of CONTEXTBOT. Some instances of ;Notes should probably be converted to ==Notes== or ===Notes===. Some should not be touched. In your search link above, the fourth result for me is Seattle, which appears to use ;Notes properly:

;Notes
:{{note label|SoundersAge|A}}Originally founded in 1974, the MLS version of the Sounders franchise was legally re-incorporated in 2007 and entered the league for the 2009 season.

That's description list markup. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:30, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Some instances of ;Notes should probably be converted to ==Notes== or ===Notes=== - I don't think that would be possible, unfortunately. which appears to use ;Notes properly: - well, ;Notes: and

;Notes
:

can all be excluded with proper regex. sapphaline (talk) 16:56, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Sapphaline, I don't think that would be possible, unfortunately. why? — Qwerfjkltalk 17:36, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Imagine you have a 3rd-level heading for a section with ;Notes in it and a 2nd-level heading before this section. What level would you give to ;Notes if that's the only information you know? sapphaline (talk) 17:43, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

It sounds like you are agreeing that this task, as proposed, is not a good task for a bot. If you can narrow your scope and show how to find articles that can be fixed without errors, and how to fix them, you might have a good bot task. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:01, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Using just boldface with newlines and proper regex will introduce no errors. sapphaline (talk) 19:46, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

Doing a regex to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, is probably a safer path. I recommend coming up with a proposal that restricts this replacement to a specific regex, like the very common ;Notes followed by {{notelist}} or {{reflist}}, and to a specific namespace, such as article space. Then find a place, like a MOS talk page, to get consensus for the bot task. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:14, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

the very common ;Notes followed by {{notelist}} or {{reflist}} - uhhhh...

Find what:	Replace with:
;Notes\n{{notelist	\n'''Notes'''\n{{notelist
; Notes\n{{notelist
;Notes\n{{reflist	\n'''Notes'''\n{{reflist
; Notes\n{{reflist

?

get consensus for the bot task - there's already community's consensus at mos:fakeheading. sapphaline (talk) 21:38, 20 October 2025 (UTC)

I see no consensus for a bot to make changes there. It's not enough that someone wrote "do not" in a MOS page, for a bot run we need to be confident that the task is clear enough that the bot won't be making a lot of errors and has support for a bot editing 20k articles to fix it. Anomie⚔ 00:48, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

I see no consensus for a bot to make changes there - ok: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#;notes_->_boldface. sapphaline (talk) 14:06, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

It appears that the proposed simpified regexes above would, in some or all cases, add a second line break where there is already a line break, causing undesirable vertical whitespace. I don't think this proposal is being considered well enough. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:01, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

That's just a matter of tweaking the regex. The first \n in the replace with can just be omitted. And the whole thing can be made more efficient with ;\s*Notes\s*\n\{\{(reflist|notelist) replace '''Notes'''\n{{$1 Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:15, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Bots don't have to just use regular expressions. They can parse the wikitext and store context regarding what heading is appropriate. isaacl (talk) 16:27, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't agree that example is a true description list. The following description detail items aren't describing the description term ("Notes"). isaacl (talk) 16:30, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Public transit redirects

Public transport and public transit are synonyms that are used interchangeably. The variation is reflected in the titles of our articles on public transit in x: for example, there's Public transport in Tallinn but Public transit in Columbus, Ohio. However, the redirect Public transit in Tallinn does not exist.

People tend to have fairly ingrained habits about these things, and may not think immediately of searching for "Public transport in Tallinn" if they usually think of it as "public transit" (as I do). Annoyingly, the search results for "Public transit in Tallinn" include the desired article, Public transport in Tallinn in fifth place.

Hence, I'm requesting that a bot go in a create the necessary redirects – for an article beginning with "Public transit in x", a redirect tagged with {{r from alternative name}} should be created at the title "Public transport in x" and vice-versa. Some of theses redirects may already exist, but in general they seem rare. Thank-you. Cremastra (talk · contribs) 20:33, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Cremastra, doesn't seem like that many are needed. Probably can be done without a bot. — Qwerfjkltalk 21:07, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

and quarry:query/98352. — Qwerfjkltalk 21:09, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

Okay. I wasn't sure how many they were. I'll just create those manually. Thanks. Cremastra (talk · contribs) 21:12, 21 October 2025 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Besides just titles starting with "Public transit" and "Public transport", it may also be worth looking at articles that contain those two words, such as History of public transport ↔ History of public transit. Some stats for mainspace:

• 332 total titles with "Public transport" exist, and 93 with "Public Transport".
• 60 total titles with "Public transit" exist, and 36 with "Public Transit".
• There are already 16 pairs of titles where both exist and point to the same article. Two have the "T" capitalized: Panyu Public Transport ↔ Panyu Public TransitPanyu Public Transit and Public TransportPublic Transport ↔ Public TransitPublic Transit.
• Two pairs of titles, Public transport in CanadaPublic transport in Canada ↔ Public transit in CanadaPublic transit in Canada and Public transport in PittsburghPublic transport in Pittsburgh ↔ Public transit in PittsburghPublic transit in Pittsburgh, already exist and aren't the same article. Probably those should be fixed somehow.

Here's a list of the ones that don't have a corresponding article: quarry:98357. Possibly not all those should be created though, or maybe only as {{R from incorrect name}} rather than {{R from alternative name}} (e.g. Rhode Island Public Transport Authority is probably "incorrect" rather than "alternative" for Rhode Island Public Transit Authority). I suspect someone AWB-ing that list would be faster than me BRFA-ing it, and it seems unlikely we'd need a bot watching for new page titles versus someone re-running that query occasionally. Anomie⚔ 21:21, 21 October 2025 (UTC)