ShinmaBot

A few possibilities

1. As discussed, neutralize categories, inerwikis, and stub templates
   • Other than stubs, I don't think there's any good way to identify other category-adding templates, and removing all templates probably isn't a good idea. They're not that common anyway.
   • For categories inclusions that have a sort key, it would be nice if they were neutralized in a way such that the name of the category was shown. For example it should do something better than just turning [[Category:Living People|Ali, Muhammad]] into [[:Category:Living People|Ali, Muhammad]], which ends-up being rendered as just the name.Removing the sort key, nowikiing, or doing something fancy are all preferable.
2. Remove exceedingly long submissions, as we often do by hand. Say, if a single section is longer than 30k, replace it with a snipped for length message. This may be more work coding than it's worth – there's only about one absurd offender per day. I only worry about them making the page inaccessible to users with slow connections or low-powered computers.
3. Remove empty submissions, or place replies like "Take it to Wikipedia:Requested articles." The more I think about this, though, the harder and less feasible it seems. Matching sections to the preload? No. Even simply removing empty sections can occasionally be the wrong thing to do. Forget this one.

×Meegs 22:19, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm thinking about neutralizing all templates (not removing them). There's really no reason for any templates to be transcluded into AFC/T and can really mess up formatting for other entries. Unneutralizing them when the article is created is very trivial. The ones you say are unfeasable are actually not that hard, assuming the preload template is known and parsed by the bot first. -- ShinmaWa^(talk) 20:53, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Oops, yeah, I meant to say that comparing to the preload is a good idea. I couldn't think of any other simple methods for detecting empty entries that won't occasionally give a (very bad) false positive. For templates, nowikiing or otherwise neutralizing all of them is fine with me too. I was thinking about the occasional benign infobox, but it doesn't matter much either way. ×Meegs 00:17, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Another

/Today is blanked at least once a week. No one has it on their watchlist for obvious reasons, and it's not always obvious upon later inspection if many submissions have since piled-up. The way I tell is by looking for Please now follow the link back to Wikipedia:Articles for creation at the top of the page. ShinmaBot could do the same, and drop a message on Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation whenever it is missing, requesting that a human repair it. ×Meegs 13:22, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

This is a automated to all bot operators

Please take a few moments and fill in the data for your bot on Wikipedia:Bots/Status Thank you Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 19:47, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Automated message to bot owners

As a result of discussion on the village pump and mailing list, bots are now allowed to edit up to 15 times per minute. The following is the new text regarding bot edit rates from Wikipedia:Bot Policy:

Until new bots are accepted they should wait 30-60 seconds between edits, so as to not clog the recent changes list and user watchlists. After being accepted and a bureaucrat has marked them as a bot, they can edit at a much faster pace. Bots doing non-urgent tasks should edit approximately once every ten seconds, while bots who would benefit from faster editing may edit approximately once every every four seconds.

Also, to eliminate the need to spam the bot talk pages, please add Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard to your watchlist. Future messages which affect bot owners will be posted there. Thank you. --Mets501 05:02, 22 February 2007 (UTC)