MyWiki:Bot requests/Archive 88

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Archive 85Archive 86Archive 87Archive 88

WikiProject Bot for Auto-Assessing Pre-Defined Article Lists

WikiProjects (and individual users) often created tables or lists of articles and their associated article assessments. As an example, Wizardman created User:Wizardman/Packers-Browns Connection to track the assessment of a specific set of articles (User:Community Tech bot sort of does this for Popular Pages already based on articles within a specific WikiProject). However, these tables or lists, especially the larger they get, can become out-of-date. I'm wondering if there is an opportunity for a bot to automate this.

The idea would be that a user could create a page, either in their user space or the Wikipedia space, that would automatically get updated by the bot every 2 weeks to show revised assessments. This initial input could be one of two options: a specific category or a user-generated list. Either way, after the initial input, the bot would format the list into a table like Wizardman's and then automatically updated every two weeks (similar to Community Tech Bot's timing). Thoughts? « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 16:02, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

For the user generated list, should it use some existing page with a list (i.e. could be an existing page in the user's userspace) or something else? Tenshi! (Talk page) 17:06, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
Tenshi Hinanawi, I struggled with that one. Obviously the easiest input would be an established category. But I can imagine, similar to the example above, that users would be interested in generating their own lists. Maybe a simple bulleted list could be the input, in addition to a category? I'm open to whatever makes most sense. « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 17:45, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
Is it possible to do this with {{database report}}? — Qwerfjkltalk 17:47, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
Additionally, I think the output would be a simple table, like this:
Article Rating
Chet Adams C
Chris Akins Start
Jake Allen (American football) Start
Joe Andruzzi C
Roy Barker (American football) Stub
The input for the bot to parse could just be a page that says:
Thanks! « Gonzo fan2007 (talk) @ 17:49, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
This could better be done by a completely separate website (sort of like how edit information is better displayed in xtools rather than in your own userpage). GalStar (talk) (contribs) 06:04, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Finish merging Template:Infobox Canadian Football League biography

Template:Infobox Canadian Football League biography and Template:Infobox gridiron football person (both are the exact same infobox) are being merged into Template:Infobox NFL biography per this discussion. NFL biography will then be renamed Template:Infobox gridiron football biography. Here is an example edit of me converting the basic parameters from a CFL infobox to an NFL infobox. I imagine a bot could do most of this. The only parameters that might require some advanced programming are the following:

  • playing_years1 and playing_team1 (2, 3, 4, etc) in the CFL infobox will just become "teams" in the NFL infobox. See this edit for an example.
  • The honors parameters in the CFL infobox like "CFLAllStar" will all be thrown under the "highlights" parameter as bulleted lists in the NFL infobox. Example edit.

I anticipate some more questions but that should be a basic enough explanation for now. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 18:32, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

I've been looking at doing this on and off for a while. I'll throw some tracking categories in there to see how crazy I need to get with the architecture of the code. Primefac (talk) 21:36, 24 August 2025 (UTC)
Some of this proposed process seems to be doing things in the wrong order. It would seem better to rename Template:Infobox NFL biography first (or at least make a redirect from Template:Infobox gridiron football biography for a future move-over-redirect), then do the other things, so that you don't wind up with an NFL-named template on CFL pages. Anomie⚔ 12:35, 25 August 2025 (UTC)
Redirect created. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 12:41, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

WikiProject Medicine tagging again

I have a list of article Talk: pages in my sandbox. There are about 1,500 of them. I would like the WikiProject Medicine banner template to be updated for all of them:

  • {{WikiProject Medicine}} → {{WikiProject Medicine |importance=Low |society=yes}}

This is the same type of request as Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 84#WikiProject bot except that this time, I'm providing a hand-curated list of articles that need to be tagged (checked by two editors) instead of relying on a search.

As always, if anyone complains about this (I don't remember any complaints on the previous run), please send them to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:36, 29 October 2025 (UTC)

Coding... Tenshi! (Talk page) 16:41, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
@Tenshi Hinanawi: I have already written the code for this. I started working on it soon after WhatamIdoing made the request. Let me know if you would like me to share it, as I have some other things to take care of. – DreamRimmer ■ 17:07, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
@DreamRimmer: I appreciate the offer, although I ended up reusing the code from TenshiBot 3. Tenshi! (Talk page) 17:24, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
BRFA filed Tenshi! (Talk page) 17:33, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
Doing... Tenshi! (Talk page) 10:28, 30 October 2025 (UTC)
{{BOTREQ}} Tenshi! (Talk page) 12:33, 30 October 2025 (UTC)
Yay! WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:35, 30 October 2025 (UTC)

Cleaning up fluctuation icons

{{resolved}} thousands of articles are using plain arrow images rather than the dedicated templates for indicating fluctuations in numbers across articles. these are:

this is obviously bad for accessibility (these images lack good descriptions for screen readers, e.g. "green arrow up"), for visual design (they have a white background that clashes in dark mode) and for maintainability (they are long strings that need to copy-pasted between articles and not centralised in one template).

this was first brought to my attention in the article 2021 Catalan regional election, which I readily fixed (and was reverted by @Impru20 for "consistency"), after which I looked a bit deeper to discovered the scope of the issue.

the solution is quite simple and may be done speedily with a simple search and replace. this may either be done with the templates above or the helper formatting template {{fluc}} for numbers values. note that for formatting, if the first option is chosen, a non-breaking space needs to be inserted between the arrow and following numbers. Juwan (talk) 10:00, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Impru20 appears to have attempted these changes, but another run is needed to fix erroneous edits to {{increase}} and its sibling templates. {{increase|10px}}, as seen in this diff, is not valid, per the template and its documentation. It needs to be changed to {{increase|size=10px}} or just {{increase}}, which defaults to 11px. {{decrease}} and {{steady}} need the same change. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:35, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
thank you to them for making these changes, though I see no reason to manually increase the size of these templates here. Juwan (talk) 20:10, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Convert calls to Template:Infobox mapframe

I have been working on converting calls to Template:Infobox mapframe to use the Module call that is built into the parent Infobox. Here is an example. These have to be customized for each different Infobox run I have done. This search shows there are approximately 4,100 pages using {{Infobox station}} that can be converted to use the native mapframe. I have a substitution template (User:Zackmann08/mapframe station) setup so that you can do the following: 

Find (with mgi flags):
\n\s*\|\s*mapframe\s*=\s*yes\s*\n^\s*\|\s*mapframe-custom\s*=\s*\{\{infobox mapframe

Replace:
\n{{subst:User:Zackmann08/mapframe station

So far, done about 30 or so and they all seem to work just fine. I'd rather not do a 4,000+ JWB run, and while I have done bots in the past, I'm not currently setup to write/run bot scripts... So if someone wanted to write a bot script to do this that would be fantastic and greatly appreciated!

Note that this should have NO noticeable change to the page it is run on. It is purely a refactor to make use of the underlying Module code in a better way. See also Wikipedia:Mapframe maps in infoboxes.

If you are interested in doing this def ping me and I'll help in anyway I can! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 20:18, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

Zackmann08, fwiw you can run JWB in bot mode if you're using a bot account. — Qwerfjkltalk 13:54, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
I'd be happy to file a BRFA on this, but I did want to let you know that your regex misses about 1/4 of the articles, mostly around articles that use the |embedded= parameter rather than |mapframe-custom=. Seems like there are a few other parameters within {{Infobox mapframe}} that will need to be added to the subst template, as well. One example is Altstadt Spandau (Berlin U-Bahn), which uses {{Infobox mapframe}} as an argument to |embedded=. Phuzion (talk) 15:44, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
User:Qwerfjkl good to know!
User:Phuzion doesn't surprise me. Will def need some tweaking. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 17:01, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
@Phuzion: one thing with the |embedded= is that you need to watch out for a case where there is also another infobox embeded... I've come across a number of cases where embedded has both {{infobox mapframe}} AND {{Infobox designation list}} for example. My current code will blow up if that happens so it has to be manually resolved. You may be able to solve that, but another option is to just not handle the |embedded= case in a bot run and leave those for me (or someone else) to do manually. That would still take a huge chunk out of the 4,000+ pages, but I will leave that to you to decide. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 17:46, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
Yep, I caught that on Union Station (Toronto), which has those exact two templates. Let me see if I can come up with a way to filter it down to articles that JUST have {{Infobox mapframe}} within |embedded=. If you come up with anything, definitely ping me here or on my talkpage. Phuzion (talk) 20:28, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
@Phuzion: try this search should help. There are a lot of em... Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 20:38, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
Alright, I think I'm pretty close to getting this working. @Zackmann08 Can you please update your substitution template to include the following parameters, which are commonly found in {{Infobox mapframe}} when found in |embedded=?
|stroke-colour=
|marker-colour= (just an alternate spelling of |marker-color= which already exists in the subst template)
Once the substitution template is updated, I should be able to file the BRFA and get this underway. phuzion (talk) 21:32, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
{{done}} @Phuzion: those should both be implemented now. Also, I moved the "template" to User:Phuzion/mapframe station so that I don't accidentally edit it during your run. I rarely, if ever, edit someone else's subpage... Obviously if additional tweaks are needed let me know! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 21:41, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
Holy cow you're quick! Thanks! Let me test a couple, and get the BRFA filed tonight! phuzion (talk) 21:43, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
This is what happens when you have no life... - Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 21:47, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
Ok, so I've made two test edits so far, one for embedded and one for mapframe. Everything look good to you? phuzion (talk) 21:50, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
Looks great! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 21:55, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
BRFA filed here. Thanks for the help! phuzion (talk) 22:15, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

Massive change of sortkeys from East Timor to Timor-Leste

Hello,

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

The following needs to be performed (example):

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

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

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

Bot to replace BR tags with list tempaltes

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

{{unbulleted list}} is said to generate HTML that produces a better result for screen readers than <br> tags, so it wouldn't be WP:COSMETIC. OTOH, I wonder whether this may turn out to be a WP:CONTEXTBOT. Anomie⚔ 13:51, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
Each of these edits needs to be considered carefully to see if it will cause Linter errors. Changing infobox parameter values from inline text using br tags to div-based text can cause div tags to be wrapped by span tags, which is a type of high-priority Linter error that we have completely cleared from Wikipedia; there were over 160,000 such errors at this time in 2018. The issue can sometimes be fixed by modifying the infobox to use div tags as wrappers, but not always, IIRC. – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:09, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Replacing Reports bot for WikiProject membership maintenance

I've been wanted to welcome new members in WP:WikiProject Medicine and ask them to join a new campaign. Unfortunately, since April, User:Harej's User:Reports bot has stopped updating the membership list (adding new users who've created a {{WikiProjectCard}} and moving inactive members to an inactive members page). Women in Red use the same system, as well as as a few smaller WikiProjects. Anybody have time to fork / rewrite that task? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 13:16, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

Have you tried contacting either of the bot operators about this? Both seem to be active recently and may be able to fix the issue. Tenshi! (Talk page) 13:20, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
The bot page says that it is not really being maintained anymore, hence my request here. But let's also ping User:The Earwig in case I'm mistaken. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 13:27, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
in case Harej, or Earwig don't want to work on it, then I can take a look at it. —usernamekiran (talk) 20:04, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
The previous time Reports bot died I made an attempt at reimplementing it on top of {{Database report}}. Admins can see the rubble of how that worked in the deleted history of Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Members/Report, Special:PermaLink/1171525384, Module:WPX cards. Not my proudest code, and the same thing could be done in a bajillion better ways today with new database report features, but it's there. * Pppery * it has begun... 21:59, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
Oh, please just let me know next time this happens. Sorry, I don't keep a close eye on it, but I can fix it when things break. I didn't realize this hadn't been working for so long. In this case it was a database schema change breaking a query. I've fixed that and the task appears to be running again. — The Earwig (talk) 05:13, 25 November 2025 (UTC)
That's fantastic, User:The Earwig, thanks. I see you've fixed the Discussion reports as well! —Femke 🐦 (talk) 08:17, 25 November 2025 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ}} The issue has been resolved by botop The Earwig. Couldn't find a better response template to mark as resolved. —usernamekiran (talk) 22:27, 3 December 2025 (UTC)

Regularly update social media statistics

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

I'd be more inclined to remove this information entirely. Everything other than the order of magnitude isn't really what Wikipedia is supposed to be for. * Pppery * it has begun... 00:23, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
@Pppery: all I will say is that in the discussions relating to the merge of the various social media templates {{infobox TikTok personality}}, {{Infobox Instagram personality}} etc that occurred at this TFD and in the discussions on Template talk:Infobox social media personality, there was overwhelming support for keeping these statistics. There was a lot removed (such as the youtube creator awards, associated acts, and a few other things. But viewer/follower/subscriber count was deemed an important metric for WP:NOTABILITY. Personally I could go either way. WP:CONSENSUS seems to be to keep it and IF it is going to stay, I think it is important to keep it up to date. You mention order of magnitude... I am in favor of a less specific number (i.e. 320 million vs 320,432,584) which I think is inline with what you mean by order of magnitude. In any case, if you feel strongly about removing them, please join the discussion on the talk page. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 05:05, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
My point is that once you only say "300 million" then that number is sufficiently static that you shouldn't need a bot. * Pppery * it has begun... 05:50, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
So that is totally valid. If the bot is just updating "300 million" to "304 million", then I totally agree not worth it. But as I've done these conversions I've come across pages that haven't had their stats updated in years. I spot checked a few out of curiousity, some haven't changed much, but some have wild fluctuations that do fall into the orders of magnitude.
I certainly don't envision this as a daily run bot, or even a weekly run. Maybe a monthly or even quarterly?
Is there any policy I'm missing that would make this an unacceptable bot or is your argument more of a "not worth the time and effort". Both are valid, just want to make sure I understand. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 08:10, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Zackmann08, I think running this on Wikidata and then pulling from there would be better, though using Wikidata on Wikipedia is controversial. — Qwerfjkltalk 08:57, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Funny story, I just stumbled across Module:YouTubeSubscribers which, at first glance, appears to do just that! I will say that still runs into the same problem of data getting stale. A bot would poll the API for YouTube, Instagram, etc. Pulling from Wikidata still relies on someone manually updating the stats, it just is manually updated on Wikidata instead of on Wikipedia. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 08:59, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Zackmann08, to be clear, repetitively updating stats edits would be more acceptable on Wikidata than on Wikipedia; there's no issues with clogging up edit history. — Qwerfjkltalk 09:11, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Cool. Appreciate the link to the previous bot request. I'll investigate importing stats from Wikidata. Looks like there is a Wikidata:Bot requests page too so I'll make a request there. Thanks much. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 09:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
See previous discussion Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 83#Bot to update follower/subscriber/view counts on relevant articles. — Qwerfjkltalk 09:01, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Awesome. Thanks for the link! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 09:04, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
I've said this before elsewhere, but if there is going to be a bot-related set of updates, it should be to a single module storing subscriber counts that {{Infobox social media personality}} calls; it would be one edit per week/month/quarter but would still allow for more accurate updating of any page calling it. Primefac (talk) 20:36, 19 October 2025 (UTC)

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 error category. cs1|2 adds this category and emits a maintenance message when it detects a value in a {{cite journal}} |page(s)= parameter that is probably an article-number. cs1|2 maintenance messages are hidden from everyone who has not enabled maintenance message display; see Help:CS1 errors § Controlling error message display. A {{cite journal}} template using |page= renders with a colon (:) preceding the page number; a template using |article-number= omits the colon.
Because the removal of a colon is more-or-less unnoticeable and because maintenance messages are hidden by default, I suspect that editors are likely to view such edits as WP:COSMETICBOT edits and demand that the bot be shut down.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:19, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
WP:COSMETICBOT is a clear line, the colon is sufficient. And the removal of the maintenance categories would fall under the "administration of the encyclopedia" bullet too. OTOH, just because it's not WP:COSMETICBOT doesn't mean that a bot to do it would automatically be allowed, just like it's possible that a bot can be approved for cosmetic edits if the community supports those edits. Anomie⚔ 15:05, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

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

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