Vero - Wikipedia:Bot requests
Template:Short description Template:Pp-move-indef Vero - Wikipedia:Bot requests/Header Template:Bots User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis
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.
- 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.
- 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)
- Template:Tq I'm not sure what you mean by that, but:
- Page views in the past 30 days: https://wikimedia.org/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
- Template:Partially 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
Template:TrackedTemplate:TrackedTemplate:Tracked
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)
- Template:Xt
- I don't see that at all in the discussion, I see closer to 1:1 (3 oppose, 3 support). Template:Tl 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)
- Template:Tq 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 Template:Tl 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 Template:Para. It seems like any sort of replacement would need to start with a well-advertised RFC that successfully deprecated Template:Para. – 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)
- The monthly parameter usage report for Template:Reflist suggests that there are 183,000 articles using Template:Para. It seems like any sort of replacement would need to start with a well-advertised RFC that successfully deprecated Template:Para. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:39, 4 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)
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 thereflisttemplate has only one parameter namedrefs. 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
refsparameter 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 besidesrefsisgroup, for which<references>has a direct equivalent (althoughrefsandgroupprobably 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
reflisthas norefsparameter (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 Template:Para or Template:Para (with or without the explicit
1=) or Template:Para should be safe to ignore those parameters, unless there are 10 or fewer references in the article. Uses with Template:Para (or probably things like Template:Para or Template:Para) should be safe to replace with Template:Tag. Other values for those parameters would likely result in a change in rendering. at least those that are valid for CSScolumn-countorcolumn-width; if someone did something like Template:Para we could probably go with Template:Tag.Template:PbCertain values of Template:Para (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 Template:Tag is used.Template:PbTemplate:Para with one of those values will almost always result in changed rendering, unless someone is doing something redundant like Template:Tlx.Template:PbAny other parameters should be safe to ignore, as the above are all I see used by Template:Tl. 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 Template:Tl 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
reflisthas only therefsparameter. 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)
- Alright, I am filing a BRFA to process the pages where the
- 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 Template:Tl and deciding what to do based on that, more or less as I described. Anomie⚔ 17:40, 6 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)
- Uses with Template:Para or Template:Para (with or without the explicit
- I'm assuming most of the time there is only the
- @Alenoach: If I am reading the discussion correctly, the only change required is to replace
- after some refs being added, the Template:Tlx 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)
- Grorp has reverted DreamRimmer bot II’s edits on a few pages, and from their comment it appears that they are unhappy with this task and intend to undo these edits on the articles they watch. I have temporarily stopped the bot. – DreamRimmer ■ 15:54, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- 🤷 They're wrong about Template:Tag not producing columns, FWIW. Presumably they're right at the edge of a transition point in the sizing. Anomie⚔ 22:00, 19 November 2025 (UTC)
- At Template talk:Reflist#Excess styles I've proposed updating Template:Tl to render the same as Template:Tag to remove that objection. Anomie⚔ 03:04, 20 November 2025 (UTC)
- 🤷 They're wrong about Template:Tag not producing columns, FWIW. Presumably they're right at the edge of a transition point in the sizing. Anomie⚔ 22:00, 19 November 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-channyan 16:38, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- Not an Template:Ifsubst style="color:#bf3c2c">error category. cs1|2 adds this category and emits a Template:Ifsubst style="color:#085">maintenance message when it detects a value in a Template:Tlx Template:Para parameter that is probably an article-number. cs1|2 Template:Ifsubst style="color:#085">maintenance messages are hidden from everyone who has not enabled maintenance message display; see Template:Slink. A Template:Tlx template using Template:Para renders with a colon (
:) preceding the page number; a template using Template:Para omits the colon. - Because the removal of a colon is more-or-less unnoticeable and because Template:Ifsubst style="color:#085">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)
Template: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 (Template:Diff):
- In all articles and categories with a name containing
Timor-Leste: - Look for:
[[Category:<string>|East<string>]]- Replace it by:
[[Category:<string>|Timor-Leste]]
- Replace it by:
- Also look for:
{{DEFAULTSORT:East<string>}}- Replace it by:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Timor-Leste}}
- Replace it by:
Place Clichy (talk) 21:55, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
- It appears there are
24881 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 Template:Diff), 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 Template:Tl do not. —Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 09:01, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
- Template:Tl is said to generate HTML that produces a better result for screen readers than Template:Tag 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)
- Template:Undone at WP:AWB/T. phuzion (talk) 02:24, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
- Template:Re This new rule will not get the job done. As explained at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos#Usage, most of the tools that use the typo list do not run the rules on section headings. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:47, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
- Good catch! Given that AWB and other tools won't actually utilize this rule, do you think it's worth removing from the RegExTypoFix list? I've marked the task as undone for now, as well. phuzion (talk) 12:38, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
- Template:Re Yes, I've removed it. -- John of Reading (talk) 13:35, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
- Good catch! Given that AWB and other tools won't actually utilize this rule, do you think it's worth removing from the RegExTypoFix list? I've marked the task as undone for now, as well. phuzion (talk) 12:38, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
- Template:Re This new rule will not get the job done. As explained at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos#Usage, most of the tools that use the typo list do not run the rules on section headings. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:47, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
- Template:Undone at WP:AWB/T. phuzion (talk) 02:24, 12 November 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 Template:Tl. 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)
- Template:Ping all I will say is that in the discussions relating to the merge of the various social media templates Template:Tl, Template:Tl 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)
- 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)
- 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
- Awesome. Thanks for the link! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 09:04, 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, 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)
- 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)
- Template:Ping all I will say is that in the discussions relating to the merge of the various social media templates Template:Tl, Template:Tl 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)
- REDIRECT Template:Template link
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)
- Template:Tl 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. Template:Tl 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:
. sapphaline (talk) 11:37, 20 October 2025 (UTC)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);
- 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. Template:Tl Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:35, 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)
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: <syntaxhighlight lang=wikitext>;Notes
- Template:Note labelOriginally founded in 1974, the MLS version of the Sounders franchise was legally re-incorporated in 2007 and entered the league for the 2009 season.</syntaxhighlight> 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 <syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext">;Notes
- </syntaxhighlight> can all be excluded with proper regex. sapphaline (talk) 16:56, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
- Sapphaline, Template:Tq why? — Qwerfjkltalk 17:36, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
- Imagine you have a 3rd-level heading for a section with
;Notesin it and a 2nd-level heading before this section. What level would you give to;Notesif 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 Template:Tl or Template:Tl, 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 Template:Tl or Template:Tl
- uhhhh...
?Find what: Replace with: ;Notes\n{{notelist\n'''Notes'''\n{{notelist; Notes\n{{notelist;Notes\n{{reflist\n'''Notes'''\n{{reflist; Notes\n{{reflistget 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)
- 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)
- 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 Template:Tl or Template:Tl, 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)
- Using just boldface with newlines and proper regex will introduce no errors. sapphaline (talk) 19:46, 20 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)
- 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)
- Imagine you have a 3rd-level heading for a section with
- 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)
- Sapphaline, Template:Tq why? — Qwerfjkltalk 17:36, 20 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 Template:Tl 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)
- Template:Ec 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: Template:-r ↔ Template:-r and Template:-r ↔ Template:-r.
- Two pairs of titles, Template:-r ↔ Template:-r and Template:-r ↔ Template:-r, 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 Template:Tl rather than Template:Tl (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)
Disambiguate all internal links
Request: Disambiguate all internal links to Akpanta (which currently redirects) and replace them with Akpanta, since the page now refers to a specific event. — NatHaddan NatHaddan (talk) NatHaddan (talk) 22:24, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
- WP:NOTBROKEN probably applies to these 27 links. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:06, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
- Probably is broken though. Why would the name not lead to the actual place, Akpanta, Nigeria? Gonnym (talk) 09:32, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
- Jonesey95, I suppose this would be fine if the plan was to then change the target of Template:-r to Akpanta, Nigeria. — Qwerfjkltalk 11:23, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
- Even then, that would be something for WP:AWBREQ since there is only 26 links pointing to Akpanta. Tenshi! (Talk page) 12:25, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
- The original article for Akpanta have be move to new name Akpanta killings which refer to specific event that happened in Akpanta. It's the cause of the redirect that's pointed to Akpanta killings instead of Akpanta, Nigeria Akpanta, Nigeria is article about the geographic region itself. NatHaddan (talk) 13:36, 7 November 2025 (UTC)
WP:CAT#T
WP:CAT#T states Template:Tqq However, templates and template categories end up in content categories. Would it be possible for a bot to look if a parent category is without Template:Tl and remove these out-of-guidelines linkings from the templates and template categories? Cases where the template or template category would end up without parents might instead be reported in a specific page. Some cases may be through the /doc and if they cannot be fixed, they may also instead be reported.
Maybe the template category part can instead be solved with a tracking category in Template:Tl but for the templates I imagine how it would work without a bot. Kaffet i halsen (talk) 08:48, 8 November 2025 (UTC)
- The idea makes sense - however, the bot wholesale removing a template from a content category and taking no further steps may not always be useful. The bot doesn't really have a way of knowing a more appropriate category for the template to be in, so I suppose it edits would have to be supervised? I will file a BRFA if anyone has any workarounds. WikiMacaroonsCinnamon? 18:45, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
- We need numbers before we start thinking about BRFA. If there are not that many they can (and probably should) be done by hand or AWB. Primefac (talk) 23:39, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
- I agree with Template:U. A query or petscan search is needed to determine the scope of this issue. As far as I know, many navboxes are housed in content categories, a de facto practice that goes against the guideline. A discussion to deprecate that practice or make an exception to the guideline may be needed if there turn out to be many such navboxes. A few editors work diligently to keep the number of uncategorized templates low (there were over 8,000 uncategorized templates just three years ago). A bot task like this has the potential to flood Template:Cl with new entries. Pinging Template:U and Template:U, who might have thoughts, since they work on fixing category issues in template space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:40, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
- Yeah, there is a large number of navboxes in content categories, and yes it seems to be a fairly common practice despite the guideline. There was an RfC in 2022 on changing the guideline which references another discussion from 2020.
- It would be interesting to see a list of navboxes categorized solely in content categories, if that is possible, while I shudder to think how many of those cases there might be. DB1729talk 04:18, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
- Commenting because I was summoned. TBH I mostly only work with template-in-category stuff when (a) the template is filed in or generating a redlinked category, or (b) the template is erroneously transcluding content categories onto the articles and drafts and such because a category that should have been wrapped in noinclude tags wasn't — I rarely get involved directly in the question of where templates should or shouldn't themselves be categorized in their own right, and in fact it's literally only a few weeks ago that I even learned that templates being categorized is a standard expectation now and not just a strictly optional choice as it used to be. So I don't know that I really have much to contribute here, because the issues where I do wander into templatespace aren't really what's being talked about here.
- But yeah, I would be a little bit concerned about the potential flood of templates into the uncategorized pages maintenance queue, though I imagine there could be ways to mitigate that, perhaps by having a bot work in carefully managed batches whose replacement template categories can be reasonably inferred from the template's type and purpose? I don't know if that's actually feasible, as I rarely work with bot programming either, but I'm sure that it's possible in theory. But since I did get pinged, I didn't want to just completely ignore the discussion even though I don't have any brilliant input. Bearcat (talk) 14:33, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
- I agree with Template:U. A query or petscan search is needed to determine the scope of this issue. As far as I know, many navboxes are housed in content categories, a de facto practice that goes against the guideline. A discussion to deprecate that practice or make an exception to the guideline may be needed if there turn out to be many such navboxes. A few editors work diligently to keep the number of uncategorized templates low (there were over 8,000 uncategorized templates just three years ago). A bot task like this has the potential to flood Template:Cl with new entries. Pinging Template:U and Template:U, who might have thoughts, since they work on fixing category issues in template space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:40, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
- We need numbers before we start thinking about BRFA. If there are not that many they can (and probably should) be done by hand or AWB. Primefac (talk) 23:39, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for the input! I cannot come up with a scan that lists all or a subset of the templates as linking may be directly or through categories or categories parents. I see them here and there, more frequently in football-related categories. I will start with AWB and see if I can learn better rules to facilitate cases such as this one (788 categories) and come back if I find something that can truly be bot work. Kaffet i halsen (talk) 20:07, 13 November 2025 (UTC)
Bot to count Twitter/X citations with August dates
a bot that uses the MediaWiki API to 1) find all pages linking to '*.twitter.com' and '*.x.com/*', 2) fetch the content of each page, 3) use regular expressions to find citations that contain a Twitter/X link and a date in 'August' (e.g., 'August 5', '12 August'), 4) aggregate a count for each day of August (1-31), and 5) post the daily counts as a response. ~2025-32995-36 (talk) 15:19, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
- ~2025-32995-36, why August in particular? — Qwerfjkltalk 18:12, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
Citation source replacement with Template:Tl
Hundreds (thousands?) of mountain articles use as a reference a paper titled "Updated world map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification" that was published in 2007 in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Volume 11, Issue 5. Typically these use Template:Tl passing in the appropriate values. However, the values were not consistently applied and so we have generated references that do not provide all the necessary information each time it's used nor is the information as complete as it could be. Thus, I created the template to provide complete information about the source reference so that it's consistent across Wikipedia. I then searched for "Updated world map of the Köppen-Geiger" to find articles using this reference source and started replacing the citation source text with <ref name=KGcc2007>{{Cite Köppen-Geiger cc 2007}}</ref>. The search found other articles on rivers and human settlements also using this source reference. At this point, I have manually edited over 360 pages to make this change, the high majority being mountain articles but also a few articles about rivers and populated places. The search currently returns over 2800 results. So at this point I think it would be good if a bot could automate this edit to articles using this source reference. Typically in mountain articles, the citation is in a "Climate" section which usually begins with the sentence "Based on the [[Koppen climate classification]],". Other times it's in the lead section. Often the citation is using a named reference, typically "Peel" for the first author, although the paper does have three authors, which is why I chose to use KGcc2007 rather than Peel. Perhaps the reference could be named a bit different to denote it was a bot edit, e.g. <ref name=KGcc2007be>. I have been using "{{Cite Köppen-Geiger cc 2007}}" as the edit summary. RedWolf (talk) 21:00, 12 November 2025 (UTC)