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BRFA activity by month
Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Whether it blips, bleeps, or breaks, you can count on the Bots Newsletter to give you the hottest scoop.
The last issue, picking up from a long hiatus, covered 2019 and 2020; the catching-up will be completed in this issue, which covers all of 2021.
Several new bot tasks were approved in January. Dreamy Jazz Bot 6, following up on a bot noticeboard thread from earlier, was approved to put {{nobots|deny=all|optout=MassMessage}} on pre-existing user talk pages of users beginning with "Vanished user" or "Renamed user" with or without the space. BattyBot 54 was approved to change Ship sail plan = Full rigged ship to Ship sail plan = Full-rigged ship on about a thousand articles; meanwhile, WikiCleanerBot 24 and 25 were approved to clean up unnecessary <nowiki/> tags.
Cyberbot II was blocked on January 17 after a malfunction caused it to go bonkers and start blanking pages. In the discussion afterwards, some noted that its shutoff flag had not been functioning properly.
While this task has quite strong support from those editors involved in template side of CS1|2 issues, there has been growing pushback from the community at large, and it has reached a point where their valid concerns are clearly no longer just an inconvenience suffered by those with large watchlists. On the plus side, all but 5 of the 40 un-hyphenated parameters have been essentially eliminated. However, there is still the issue of the those five parameters: it will take approximately four months for |accessdate= to be replaced at current edit rates, and 1-2 months for the other four. This, understandably, is unacceptable to many.
Thus, until such matters can be decided, the bot task will be put on hold and a CENT-advertised RFC started on the deprecation of these parameters to hopefully put the matter to rest.
ShortDescBot was approved for a second task, in which it was planned to add 210,000 short descriptions to organism articles, and improve 2,000 existing short descriptions for moths.
On Meta, Martin Urbanec's global bot policy RfC was closed with "clear consensus that a change is needed, however, it's not clear what is its correct form". Closer Tks4fish added the following notes to the close:
The discussion will run for 2 weeks.
The bot operator must demonstrate the bot task is welcomed on multiple Wikimedia projects. A good way to show it is to be flagged on 5 or more wikis for a single task.
The operator should make sure to adhere to the wiki's preference as related to the use of the bot flag.
The discussion will be publicized via MassMessage (to be created), where interested community members and wikis can be subscribed.
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