User talk:Josh Parris/Archive 9

Archive 5

←

Archive 7

Archive 8

Archive 9

Archive 10

Archive 11

→

Archive 13

All problems disappeared from book - why?

On March 6 WildBot identified a problem with redlinks on Book:Big 12 Conference head football coaches lists. On March 9 it updated the talk page message, because one of the pages was created. But then on March 14 WildBot decided for some reason that all the problems had been fixed, even though nothing had changed. The Book was not modified and the two redlinked pages have never existed. What happened? Reach Out to the Truth 02:54, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

WildBot's parsing code got tightened up. Previously it checked all links contained in a book, now it only checks the printable pages.

The book only contains headings, and no pages - download the PDF to see. The headings are hyperlinked, which is an odd thing to do in a book. HeadBomb, do you have any thoughts on the matter? Josh Parris 03:44, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

The problems seems to be that the book had a non-standard syntax. That is, articles were declared with ;[[Foo]] rather than with :[[Foo]]. I've fixed this now, so WildBot should be picking up these as problems once again. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:52, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Specifically, I was thinking ought WildBot note there are non-printing links in the book? Josh Parris 06:56, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm unsure. I'll have to browse a few books, but I don't recall this being a common problem. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:00, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Myself, I'm in favour; it is a confusing thing and having someone point out what's wrong would be helpful. Josh Parris 07:02, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

The situation is not that simple, some links are non-printing but aren't problematic either. I have to browse some books to find a way to exclude the non-problematic links. It's getting late here (or early, depending on how you see it), but I'll look into this tomorrow first thing when I get up. In the meantime, #Additional task for WildBot affects most books (both user and community) and shouldn't require my attention, so you could work on that in the meantime (assuming you don't have anything else to do, it's your time after all). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:17, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Any word on this Headbomb? Josh Parris 11:24, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Well I browsed many books and I can't find even one where this is a problem. Can you compile a list of books with such links? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 05:35, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

It would be just as easy to implement as to acquire the data. Josh Parris 13:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Don't you need to know what you are trying to fix before fixing it? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:36, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, not trying to fix anything, just identify brokenness. Josh Parris 06:42, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

WildBot parsing template code?

Should it be? See [1], thanks. – ukexpat (talk) 16:00, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, that's not cool. I'll poke around. Josh Parris 16:37, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. – ukexpat (talk) 17:51, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done that wasn't too hard. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

League of STEAM

WildBot keeps posting on the Talk page of the League of STEAM, "Found ambiguous links to Jäger". However, Professor Jager exists on the disambiguation page and clicking check or fix on WildBot's talk page addition says "no disambiguation found." --Jonnybgoode44 (talk) 18:23, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done Professor Jager doesn't exist on the dab page, but I've linked to the (disambiguation) page as you seemed to want to talk about the German word. Josh Parris 13:32, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Talk:List of characters with surname Carpenter

Hello,

I got in trouble creating Carpenter House (disambiguation) from Carpenter House. It solved the DAB problem, but got others mad at me. Any suggestions? See my talk page. Jrcrin001 (talk) 02:19, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, you kinda did it the wrong way - the instructions say to make (dismbiguation) a redirect. But it looks like it's all sorted out, so I'll just keep moseying along. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Articles tagged by WildBot

Hi! Nice bot! I changed User:WildBot/m01, User:WildBot/m02, User:WildBot/m04 to make them include the articles tagged to a category: Category:Articles tagged by WildBot. I hope you don't mind. In any case revert for whatever reason you think it should be. --JokerXtreme (talk) 10:34, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

I can't think of a reason to object, but equally I don't see what anyone gains. Meh. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

It gives people an easy way to find articles than need fixing. --JokerXtreme (talk) 13:57, 25 April 2010 (UTC).

Broken WildBot edit

See this diff. WildBot added a talk banner, I fixed the ambiguous links, WildBot removed the banner again - but also took some whitespace with it, breaking the first section header. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 18:23, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done I think I've fixed this, if anyone sees WildBot do something of this nature, please holler. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Monument aux morts-Somme/Oise/Aisne

You have run the "disambiguation" microscope through my recent articles which has highlighted the need for several changes and I am therefore more than grateful for your intervention as the articles have benefited from it.Weglinde (talk) 17:44, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

No worries. Thanks for helping tidy up around here! Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Removing WildBot tags

Do you mind when other users remove your WildBot tags manually? I've been in situations where I see your tag pop up on a page, removed the dab pages myself, and then the tags. ----DanTD (talk) 14:15, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) There's no problem removing the tags manually (as far as I can see) unless you're blanking the page in doing so, in which case it's better to let WildBot blank, and 7SeriesBot delete. I don't really see the need to do it manually though - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 14:17, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

The disambiguation on the Lagrangian point article has been addressed with this edit, but the tag on the talk page still remains. Should it take two days?—RJH (talk) 16:44, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm still shaking out bugs from WildBot, and a lot of them are to do with how WildBot currently runs. In the olden days, it used to be fired up by myself manually and it would run until it crashed. Now it's automatically restarted by a script, but it's prone to floundering on Unicode page names in this new environment. I'm still working to reduce the frequency of it crashing. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Looks all cleared up now. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Ottoman Empire Disambiuation

I tried to clear out the disambigution links in the article Ottoman Empire tagged by the wildbot. But the article is lengthy and I may miss some. Can you please check any remnant disambigution links in the article  ? Thanks. Nedim Ardoğa (talk) 13:13, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

You can use the check and fix links in the notice to see if there are and disambiguation links. Only a trancluding template has disambiguation links. — Dispenser 16:38, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done Looks all cleared up now. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

WildBot no longer removing tags?

It seems that WildBot is no longer removing tags. Perhaps this feature has gotten b0rkd? Really love the 'bot... I spend hours combing through the tagged articles fixing the problems. I have no life... :)- UtherSRG (talk) 22:04, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, it gets stuck, and if I don't notice... well. 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Wildbot has not removed tag?

It seems that a wildbot tag is stuck on my article "Danger Angel band" for 3-4 days now and since I'm new here I'm not sure if I did the corrections suggested right. I did what it said (plus a lot of other things) and it's still there, so I'm not sure if I did what I had to do.I did remove the tag on otp of the article so maybe this is why but I can't tell. Thanks. alexpts (talk) 11:32, 19 April 2010

Alex ... is there actually anything about that band that meets WP:MUSIC (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 11:16, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done Looks all cleared up now. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

wildbot (malta)

It appears wildbot is picking up dis links that are not on this page I think. I mean I have been wrong before. However the link for checking this doesn't show the pages wildbot is reporting either. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Krj373 (talk • contribs) 19:59, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

If in doubt, follow the check or fix links in the message box. However, you're going to find something curly: Malta links to 1 redirect which points back -- Maltese Islands (redirect page) -> Malta. See User talk:Josh Parris/Archive 9/faq Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Pan American Association of Anatomy / International Morphological Terminology

PAA stands for Pan American Association of Anatomy. Not pertain to any existing references to the date on wikipedia. So that it could include and write like this:

PAA May refer to: Pan American Association of Anatomy, a scientific organization. --Giselle Chamorro (talk) 22:18, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done dab page edited. Generally, linking to the full name and the abbreviation doesn't add any value. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

12 Square meter Sharpie (dinghy)

Headings corrected. I suggest that I remove the wildbot tagNED33 (talk) 12:58, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done Looks all cleared up now. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Misidentifications

I have done some dab fix/checks at Battle of Soltau and removed the tag. It has now been replaced by Wildbot. Problem appears to be a misidintification of redirected pages as needing disambiguation - the pages pointed to divert to the correct place. I'll remove the tag again but I'd appreciate it if someone could look at this to see if the problem of false positives is more widespread. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Monstrelet (talk • contribs) 16:45, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

In this instance, it appears that dab_solver is not up to the task and you have to do it manually (although I can't explain why). Foot Solider appears in the {{Infobox Military Conflict}}. Rearguard is linked within Battle of Soltau#Background - for help fixing these links, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Fixing a page. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

OK, I've changed the links with pipes so it should solve the Wildbot problem. However, both were redirecting to the correct place - there was no disambiguation problem. Monstrelet (talk) 09:40, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

OK, it's back. I'm not going to do any more on this. Josh, if you intend to roll this bot out wider you have got to get this problem sorted or you will cause a lot of grief. I'll put a note on the article talk page to ignore it. Monstrelet (talk) 08:41, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done WildBot seems to agree that the problems are fixed Josh Parris 07:27, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

FrescoBot is conflicting with WildBot

Please see the history of this book, beginning with this edit. I followed the directions given by WildBot and corrected them in this edit, and FrescoBot came along afterward in this edit and reverted what I'd done. Now WildBot is complaining about it again. Please work something out so we don't have dueling bots. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 09:27, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Frescobot won't edit the book namespace from now on, so WildBot doesn't have to do a thing. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 10:00, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

"Dueling bots?" I'm struck with an image of two robots playing "Dueling Banjos" on crappy midi processors through a 2" speaker. (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 11:27, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Heading levels in template/doc pages

Hi - I think you may want to have wildbot ignore template/doc pages because, due to the way in which they are transcluded, they will almost always start with a lower level heading (h3) than the final other sections. An example is here but I think you will find the same thing on almost all template doc pages. You can see that it looks correct when viewed in {{FYI-note}}. Thanks.  7  03:35, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Doing... I'll look into a solution. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done checking for that error will exclude any page with "/" in its title. Josh Parris 14:25, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Nice work

Just wanted to let you know that WildBot's dablink and #section-link function appears to me to have worked out OK in the end, especially after your modifications of the placement and formatting of the talk-page display. With the exception of certain specific namespace issues that've been already pointed out (and I think largely resolved by you and Basilico), FrescoBot's mass across-the-wiki prompting of WIldBot appears to only have been problematic on the initial run. Thanks for a job well done. ... Kenosis (talk) 13:17, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm pleased that the problem was able to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Josh Parris 13:42, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

WildBot showing false broken #section link

First off, great work on WildBot. It's an incredibly useful tool. Thanks for your work on creating and/or maintaining it.

However, on the Talk:List of Pittsburgh Steelers seasons page WildBot is reporting a broken #section link, which appears to be fine. Can you take a look when you get a chance? Thanks! — DeeJayK (talk) 13:47, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Doing... I'll investigate. Josh Parris 14:07, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done double spaces were used in the link; WildBot now understands that these are interchangeable with a single space. Josh Parris 15:02, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Oops, my bad on the extra spaces. Thanks for the quick response. — DeeJayK (talk) 16:19, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm glad you came and whined, it gave me an opportunity to fix this bug. Josh Parris 06:32, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Not good work regarding dabpages

emendation and superfamily, and a whole lot of other stuff used in biological articles on a regular basis, make little if any sense to disambiguate. Cases like the former two are just wikified to help people understand a technical term, and besides "emendation" redirects to a dabpage which is clearly a bug not a feature. Also, since we can have redlinks on dabpages (particularly genera named after some person or place, where we have problems enough with legacy disambiguations that themselves are ambiguous), there is often nothing to disambiguate to.

There needs to be some mechanism that prevents the bot from re-adding its inanities if they have been removed after review. Otherwise it will "fix" things en masse that never were broken in the first place, and in the end will spawn good-faith errors - which us regulars then will have to fix manually. And fixing bot errors suck beyond belief, especially in cases like this when the bot simply slaps its "improvement notes" back on again and in general because a human editor can simply not keep up with a bot's output.

In a nutshell, there must be some "editor's override" here. Thanks for fixing this. Dysmorodrepanis (talk) 05:58, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

User talk:Josh Parris/Archive 9/faq

Having said that, disambiguating to redlinks is encouraged - because redlinks encourage article creation, and explicitly show what the intended link was. Unintentional links to disambiguation pages are discouraged, but intentional links are addressed at User talk:Josh Parris/Archive 9/faq. Josh Parris 06:32, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Wildbot's OCD

You might want to stick some delays in your code. I cannot see why Wildbot needs to rush to tag pages twice as it did to Talk:Frank Skinner's Opinionated, when I had removed the first tag to fix the issue that minute. What is worse, is it then waits 5 hours to come back and remove the tag. Not a criticism by any means, just a thought. MickMacNee (talk) 12:41, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

User:WildBot#Why does WildBot edit the talk page so much?, but the worse part is addressed by User talk:Josh Parris/Archive 9/faq - sometimes WildBot falls over and then falls behind.

As a philosophical issue, only careful design can prevent a bot not looking like it's got OCD, and there wasn't a great amount of care applied to WildBot's design. Josh Parris 06:32, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Could you add to your FAQ (or answer here): Is WildBot limited to new articles, and if so, when will you start identifying DABs on all articles?

You are the coolest bot and I can't wait till you get unleashed on the whole of WP. Andrew Gradman ^talk/_WP:Hornbook 04:56, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm pretty busy just keeping on top of bugs turned up in WildBot's current workload; I'm also having trouble with getting decent performance out of it. Once both problems are addressed, I'd consider widening its activities, but in the meantime if there are pages you want identified there's User talk:Josh Parris/Archive 9/faq Josh Parris 06:32, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

St, Andrew's Crosse

Hi. Your Ref: > Links from this article which need disambiguation (check | fix): St. Andrew’s Crosse, < I have quoted this important text verbatim, and I am not sure how to apply your "Wiki-disambiguation" to this circumstance? Ta Steve. Stephen2nd (talk) 13:00, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

I imagine you're talking about Talk:United Kingdom; just follow the "fix" link and pick "Flag of Scotland". Josh Parris 14:52, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Wildbot and book titles

I've added an additional message for books which lack titles (level 2 headers). For community books this isn't much of a problem (they all have titles, and it's easy to catch mistakes as they happen), but it is very common for user books. And since user books often have weird titles, placing ==BASEPAGENAME== below {{saved book}} isn't much of a solution, so a notice would be best I think. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 05:33, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done Josh Parris 13:29, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

See Category:Wikipedia books (community books without titles) Josh Parris 09:31, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

I notice that all of these have titles (and had them) at the time Wildbot flagged them, other that Book:Information Theory. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 21:09, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

False positive

A tag has been placed here and I cant find any disambag links on the article page, do I remove the tag from the talk page or leave it on it thanks. Mo ainm~Talk 18:41, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

In this instance, it appears that dab_solver is not up to the task and you have to do it manually (although I can't explain why). Waldnaab appears both in the {{Infobox Fluss}} and in the second paragraph of Haidenaab#Course - for help fixing these links, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Disambiguation/Fixing a page. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

This WildBot is to wild. It is adding infomation about disambig even if it was removed few seconds ago. This bot can and should work much slower. Talk:Eostrobilops hirasei. --Snek01 (talk) 21:16, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

I need specifics to address any problems you have. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Well in the case I am pointing out, the article is tagged with the links to Waldnaab need disambaguation, they don't as both go directly to the correct article. Maybe I am missing something. Mo ainm~Talk 15:25, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Tennis score#Scoring a game to Tennis score#Scoring A Game

Your bot has changed from the first (correct) link to the second (incorrect) link 3 times today in List of numbers. Is there a way to mark an article as exempt until the problem can be resolved. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 19:11, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

The bot user page states how to remove a talk page from the list, but not how to remove an article page.... — Arthur Rubin (talk) 19:26, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Doing... I've disabled WildBot on that particular page for the moment, and will try to figure out why it's choosing that "fix". Josh Parris 06:32, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Probably caching again? I've undone the section title change in the target article (among other style fixes), and the bot may have missed that.—Emil J. 13:00, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done caching, but not in any way that's reared it's head before. WildBot also caches the anchors on a revision_id of a page - so for each revision it's got to examine, it caches the anchors in a database so it only has to download the HTML once. For some unknown reason, blowing the cache for that revision of Tennis score away made everything better. I hope this doesn't happen again, but if it does I'll just blow the whole cache away - it might slow things down a bit, but better that than getting this kind of thing wrong. Josh Parris 14:56, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Wildbot is tagging talk pages for deletion

Hi. I've seen several instances recently where WildBot has created a talk page in order to add a notice about ambiguous links, and then immediately tagged the page for deletion per CSD G7. For example Talk:Supernave. Something's gone wonky, methinks. andy (talk) 16:26, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

If it's gone by the time you get to check it, let me know .... (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 16:35, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Bwilkins, could you restore Talk:Supernave into my user-space so I can inspect the history? Josh Parris 01:29, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Right here, mon ami! (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 09:17, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! Josh Parris 23:38, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm inferring the explanation from the current tagging of the article: WildBot immediately tags the talk page for deletion whenever an article is tagged for deletion (a7 at the moment); I'm guessing previous tagging was successful in deleting Supernave, and that the tag was removed one time. Josh Parris 23:38, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Book oddity

Sometimes, WildBot places a report on the talkpage, but forgets to set |wildbot=yes in {{saved book}}. See the histories of Book:The Beach Boys and Book talk:The Beach Boys for example. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 12:52, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I can't see it happening any time recently; it may have been not running the current codebase at the time. Josh Parris 06:57, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

It edited Book talk:The Beach Boys at 10:23, 29 April 2010 (UTC), but not Book:The Beach Boys Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:03, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Those two edits are tied pretty closely together; a perusal of the code doesn't throw anything obvious out as a candidate for an error. When my Internet access is fixed I'll try to reproduce this, but at the moment I've got nothing; a couple of other examples - if they come to mind - would help me isolate the cause. Of course, it could be that WildBot crashed in between edits ('net access required to check the logs, which will probably be gone by the time I get to them). Josh Parris 08:37, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Wildbot and user books

The bot seems to be running fine enough to be unleashed on user books. What do you think? Time to unleash the fury?Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 05:33, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Doing... Give me a couple of days to put code in place to permit user-space editing. Josh Parris 08:46, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I notice WildBot isn't running on books anymore? Is this some unintended consequence of this new code being developped? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 21:10, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Insufficient robustness. I'll do a specific community book run. Josh Parris 13:31, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Still doing... I'm short of time at the moment, but will add this functionality in the next week or two. Josh Parris 13:31, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

There's an actual chance I could do something on this over the weekend. Josh Parris 06:40, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Looking forwards to it. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:48, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

 Done and away she goes... Josh Parris 14:47, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

WildBot false positives

WildBot is re-reporting false positives at Book:Radiohead, saying that COM LAG (2plus2isfive), Exit Music (For a Film), Harry Patch (In Memory Of), and Street Spirit (Fade Out) need to be piped to removed those parentheses. But those are parenthetical titles, not disambiguations like WildBot's correct reports (such as Just (song), Atoms for Peace (band), etc.). Could you please see if there's something you could do to fix this issue? Thanks! --Dylan620 (contribs, logs) 23:33, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

They're listed in different sections of the report because, as you've noticed, one lot are links to disambiguation pages, and the other is titles with parenthesis. Generally, articles with parentheses are disambiguated, but obviously in this case they are not; unfortunately the algorithm used to detect this doesn't allow for that at the moment - it assumes that any article with parenthesis would be clear in a book because the context of the book makes the disambiguating parenthesis redundant.

The easy solution is just to pipe the title, like so: [[Exit Music (For a Film)|Exit Music (For a Film)]]. Josh Parris 00:20, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that is the desired behaviour. 99% of the time the parentheses are undeeded. The bot is essentially asking "Please check if the parentheses makes sense, if they do, pipe them like [[Foo (bar)|Foo (bar)]] [2], if they don't, pipe them like [[Foo (bar)|Foo]] [3]". Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:47, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/7SeriesBOT 2

Hello, Josh Parris. You have new messages at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/7SeriesBOT 2.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

- Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:48, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Josh, I replied there - as I said, I wanted to let you settle back in before discussing (and of course, I hope you saw my apology for submitting it while you were away without asking waaaaay up on this page). (talk→ BWilkins ←track) 15:38, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't have a problem building this code, but my available time has recently collapsed into a hole. I can wave you in the right direction, look over any work you do on it, or you can rely on randoming appearing chunks of availability from me; whatever floats your boat. Josh Parris 13:08, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I've had a chance to do a little coding, but nothing that's ready to run yet. Josh Parris 02:26, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

List of The Penguins of Madagascar episodes

False positives are also being identified at List of The Penguins of Madagascar episodes, but the identified links seem fine. --AussieLegend (talk) 01:22, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I've started the process of blowing away the cache. Josh Parris 01:42, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

 Done having blown the cache away, it is now processing correctly. Josh Parris 02:22, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. --AussieLegend (talk) 02:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Cheddar Yeo

Please stop adding your stuff to Cheddar Yeo. The disambiguation link to River Yeo is done on purpose. --Simple Bob (talk) 16:15, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

See User:WildBot#I_meant_to_link_to_a_disambiguation_page.21. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:16, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

 Done I've linked to the dab for you. Josh Parris 00:12, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

WildBot skips redirects in user books

See User:Asad Mahmood Butt/Books/History of India I (contains 5 redirects: George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, Muslim League, Timeline of major famines in India during British rule (1765 to 1947), Subramanya Bharathy, Bombay Mutiny) and the report on User talk:Asad Mahmood Butt/Books/History of India I. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:14, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

 Done the namespace for database lookups was hardcoded. Josh Parris 22:55, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Wildbot strips empty parameters (|cover-color=, |subtitle=, etc...)

If anything, it should add these empty parameters when not present. All books should contains

{{saved book
 |title=
 |subtitle=
 |cover-image=
 |cover-color=
}}

Whether they are filled or not. This makes it easier for editors (and reminds them) to find covers, colors, etc... Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:02, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Doing... This is a variant on what I understood the spec to be, and is easily fixed. Josh Parris 23:52, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

 Done, reprocessing the world. Josh Parris 00:04, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

WildBot gone wild at 7

This edit seems to have marked all Wikilinks as being a problem. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 07:19, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I thought I fixed all the dud edits, sorry I missed that one. I'm currently trying to improve WildBot's performance, and it's lead to a couple of regressions such as this. For the moment I've reverted those changes. Josh Parris 07:35, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Avril Lavigne

Crazy edit here. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 07:39, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Having trouble with WildBot

It seems WildBot doesn't like pages where it finds multiple disambigs. I've just been trying to fix all the problems I made with my article Manchester City F.C. season 2001–02. Fixing links works fine up to a point but eventually after about 5-10 fixes, clicking a link to fix it inevitably loads the article you've selected - this happens without you actually double-clicking or following the links or anything. It just spontaneously loads a link you just fixed. When you go back a page, WildBot has screwed up all the links you corrected - fixed links get duplicated in places they shouldn't be, parts of links get wiped so they just cut off in the middle of words, and so on. Since I can't save the page without every one of the links fixed, I can't make an intermediary save either - not through WildBot's beta fixing program, anyway.

For the sake of giving you a chance to look at the problem, I won't fix the page by the conventional method for the time being. Please give me a message on my talk page if you have the time, at a point when you're finished with my page and I can fix the disambiguations - you may or may not feel the need to test it, it's your call. Falastur2 ^Talk 22:28, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

This is a problem with the tool that WildBot's "fix" link brings you to, not WildBot. I'm glad someone other than me is having this problem. I'll describe it more succinctly: when selecting the same link a second time from the popup, instead of fixing the problem, the link is loaded. We should point this out to User:Dispenser - UtherSRG (talk)

It was a race condition, I called the redirect list builder (which removes the spinner) before adding the spinner. Since the query is cached on the second time an error is thrown when it tries to remove something that doesn't exist yet. — Dispenser 18:50, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

List of Tarantella casts

The links to sections were correct the way they were; the bot broke them; I have reverted its edits. — Robert Greer (talk) 22:00, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I've raised this at User talk:Basilicofresco Josh Parris 01:03, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks. -- Basilicofresco (msg) 07:23, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Follow me

Great, I created two lists with a good number of pages to process. Happy crunching. :) -- Basilicofresco (msg) 14:19, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Status

Is the bot up and running? I haven't seen an update from the bot in several hours. - UtherSRG (talk) 08:29, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

 Done It appears somebody accidentally logged the bot out. Fixed. Give it a chance to catch up. Josh Parris 12:08, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Glitch

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Pythagorean_theorem&curid=23662&action=history

--Bob K31416 (talk) 05:12, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

I reported continued malfunction at WP:ANI because of the message on Wildbot's user page "Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it ." --Bob K31416 (talk) 13:30, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Oxygen absorption by concrete in the Biosphere 2 project building

Hello, just for your information. Sorry, it took me several months to discover this discussion thread. Hereafter my answer to the user Some thing (talk). Best regards, Shinkolobwe (talk) 11:31, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Hello Some thing. It took me several months to discover your message on the discussion page of concrete. Hereafter, you will find my answer. I have a background in chemistry and this original section was quite surprising for me. So, I did my best to put the things in their context and to clarify what was for me simply an erroneous interpretation of CO₂ absorption by portlandite present in the concrete. I do not know your background. If you are a specialist working for the Biosphere 2 project building, I would be pleased to have more information on the question and to know your opinion. If you are not a specialist (and it is not a criticism), I would suggest you to gather more information on the question and to be sure to understand yourself the mechanisms at work before to publish them on Wikipedia. The important is that such information is verifiable and can be understood by a normal reader. It was not the case in the original section. Best regards, Shinkolobwe (talk) 11:23, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

The section "CO2 uptake by concrete in the Biosphere 2 project building" was originally about oxygen but someone deleted any mention of oxygen absorption and made it about CO2 absorption. Some thing (talk) 00:55, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

This diff shows User:Shinkolobwe made the change you're complaining about; the comment was "(→Oxygen depletion: Rename: the title of this section is misleading: per se, concrete does not absorb oxygen, nor deplete the atmosphere in O2)". Have a chat with them and find out why the change was made. Josh Parris 01:24, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I modified this section simply because the content was likely wrong. Chemically, concrete aging cannot absorb molecular oxygen. At the contrary, portlandite, Ca(OH)₂, present in cement can easily undergo carbonation with CO₂ present in the air to produce CaCO₃. As a consequence, it affects the mass balance calculations of the photosynthesis / respiration processess taken into account in the biosphere project. The only physical process able to trap O₂ could be the physical adsorption of oxygen gas onto the CSH minerals present in the concrete, or O₂ dissolved in the cement porewater. In my opinion, these two last processes are minor and could be omitted without problem in the model simplification. Anyway, if any, the exact process possibly responsible for the observed artefact in the biosphere project should be clearly mentioned and documented in a verifiable and understandable way. Moreover, I think that this information should be best given and discussed in the biosphere project itself where it is relevant to the context than in the page on concrete where it appears very anecdotic and misleading. The more misleading point is that by reading this original section a "non-scientifically educated" normal reader could easily imagine that oxygen in a close and confined space could be simply depleted by its interaction with the concrete to hypoxic conditions and presents a safety risk. If I missed a an important point, I would be pleased to understand the real processes at work for a direct oxygen capture into concrete. Best regards, Shinkolobwe (talk) 11:08, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Washington (U.S. state)

As you probably know, the U.S. state of Washington got moved to Washington (U.S. state) and now Washington is the disambiguation page. Someone on the disambig talk suggested I add {{User:WildBot/tag}} to all the articles' talk pages, but of course doing that would take forever also, plus it would probably light up talk pages like never before. I made a page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Washington/Link repair for people to share regular expressions and pattern matches. I'm hoping that if people can come up with a group of clever patterns, some bot(s) (like WildBot) can match these first, which would cut down massively on the number of articles that will have to be looked at by humans (and/or end up on WildBot's watchlist). I don't know if disambiguating Washington links would already be within WildBot's remit as a disambiguation bot, but I figured I'd ask. --Closeapple (talk) 10:22, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I can see the attraction of having a bot do this massive disambiguation task for you, but at the moment I don't know of a reliable and efficient technique for doing so. Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links will notice your predicament in about four weeks (the list is regenerated at the start of each month) and solve the problem of 9401 links in short order.

Having said that, I'm willing to entertain suggestions as to how to go about this. Perhaps on the talk page of each of the disambiguation options (eg, Washington (U.S. state)) reliable regexes could be listed... my concern is that any fool could edit them.

I do have the ability to follow all the links from a page and tag those pages, and adding something to follow all the links to a page wouldn't be too hard. Josh Parris 10:58, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

As you mentioned, certainly bots shouldn't source the publicly-editable version of the regexes directly; my assumption would be that a bot owners would manually approve a regex after reviewing it or doing a dry run, and either tool authors would do the same, and/or tool users would review the changes. I picked a single place for the regexes because all of them (regardless of target) would probably affect the same audience of authors, so users don't have to run around gathering them up. Is the matter of "reliable and efficient" one of efficient page-walking, or one of having a high enough portion of "sure fixes" to make cranking through thousands of pages worth the resources? --Closeapple (talk) 03:52, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

I keep coming back to solutions to deal with disambiguation that are the same solutions that are used in classifying spam: Bayesian filtering, and rule-based. As with spam filtering, there's going to be a level of mis-classification, and as part of my conservative nature I have a fear of that (but even with that danger, the same problem occurs with humans doing disambiguation). In spam filtering, rule-based has over time proven to be a fragile method, whereas Bayesian filtering seems to have held up reasonably well, but combining both techniques seems quite a solid method. The trouble with Bayesian filtering is training data; obtaining it will be expensive.

So, by reliable, I mean a low enough rate of mis-classification.

Let's entertain a regex using rules-based system, with positive and negative weights on the rules. There could be a whitelist of contributors working on subpages to the disambiguation talk page (e.g. Talk:Washington/Washington (U.S. state)) that contain the regexes; a bot could auto-revert anyone not on the whitelist (presumably humans would notice and put helpful editors onto the whitelist).

I'd certainly prefer dry-runs to be made, as I can't predict how this will work out.

I'm warming to this idea. Where to next? Josh Parris 07:53, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

I would fear Bayesian filtering also: perhaps the corpus would be big enough to support it if already-relinked items were considered; but I think it would lead to insufficiently-conservative results especially at the beginning. (I seem to remember the guidelines on Wikipedia being that, if one doesn't know what to relink to, it should be left ambiguous rather than misleading.) I feel fairly optimistic that regexes could catch enough low-hanging fruit immediately, that it would reduce the manual workload to that of more typical major disambiguation pages. I suspect there will be a steady stream of new ambiguous "Washington" linking for a while, however, since it has been ingrained behavior for so long that Georgia (U.S. state) is the only of the 50 U.S. states with a disambiguator, that editors won't even question that [[Washington]] is the correct state link until they stumble into the disambiguation page someday. (Again, the regexes on disambiguation bots/tools should continue to catch a lot of those, and Bayesian filters may have enough training to be reliable by then.) On the subject of where to go next: I already left messages on Talk:Washington, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Washington, and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Georgia (U.S. state) (since they probably deal with a similar problem on an ongoing basis). I also left a message on User talk:R'n'B (who owns RussBot) and he fixed one of the regexes on Wikipedia:WikiProject Washington/Link repair (noting that "Washington State" is itself a disambiguation page). Maybe I should leave a message on Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos asking for more suggestions. That project seems to do OK with its public regex list — without major vandalism, it seems — and that may be one of the "hotbeds" of regex creation on Wikipedia. They may even welcome adding these to the list, which would spread it to everyone using AutoWikiBrowser. Perhaps you know some other places where people do this a lot. --Closeapple (talk) 21:15, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

I see since I made this comment, the count of links is down to 6564 - it appears a disambiguator is on the problem already. Josh Parris 12:51, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

http://toolserver.org/~jason/disambig_links.php shows 4215 (and it was about 4600 when you mentioned 9401). By the time I noticed the change, everything in the Template namespace had already been fixed; I suspect the large drop (and/or discrepancy in counts) is the result of counts from old transclusions getting flushed during edits or null edits. I would guess that Jason's daily count is closer to the count of what needs to be fixed, since he also runs the Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links contest you linked to before, where that sort of result would be relevant. Do spikes like 4200 (or for that matter 9400) commonly occur on Wikipedia, or is this a pretty big deal (as I suspect)? --Closeapple (talk) 21:15, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

http://toolserver.org/~jason/disambig_link_count.php?title=Washington is down to 1804. I'd say that either someone's running some kind of bot (in which case I'd really love to know its match patterns), or I far underestimated the proportion of template use. (There's also the possibility that people really are fixing them manually en masse.) Anyway, I added a couple more patterns to the list. --Closeapple (talk) 05:40, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Now down to 475; I think that's only for article namespace. This is turning out to not be a "big job" after all. (Unless it turns out later that some bots were too liberal in their relinking. I haven't seen any examples of that though.) I guess it will end up settling down to just higher levels of new links to the disambiguation page until word gets around that Washington links need parentheses. I'm still posting patterns when I see new types of prose that can be classified by a regex though. --Closeapple (talk) 08:51, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I also let my desire to address disambiguation get ahead of my ability to devote any time to it. It looks like this problem is rapidly getting under control, so I'm going to let this one slide. Josh Parris 11:12, 13 May 2010 (UTC)