Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 89

Unnecessary disambiguations

Is there a way a bot could find instances of unnecessary disambiguations? Specifically, instances of articles named "Title (parenthetical)" where there isn't currently an article at just "Title". (In other words, something like Floofy (band) existing where Floofy is still a redlink.)

I ask this because sometimes I see people stick (film) or (band) at the end of article names unnescessarily, or sometimes the non-parenthetical gets deleted via AFD or PROD and the parenthetical version is never moved to reclaim the title. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 17:15, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

I’ve also seen several instances of this during NPP, I will try coming up with something. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 17:42, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

I did a quick database query and found a total of 37,887 of these, which is far too large to make any kind of useful report. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:50, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

Can these be moved by a bot? If better information is needed before a bot run, then maybe sort by disambiguation and move the ones we know for sure can be moved (pages with (film), (country film), etc.). Gonnym (talk) 18:06, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, that might narrow it down. Start with ones that are "Name (film)" in cases where "Name" doesn't exist, then maybe the same with (band), as those are the two I see most often. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 18:20, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

All 37,000 can't be moved by a bot because sometimes the actual name of a proper noun includes parentheses, like Barugh (Great and Little) (okay, Barugh technically exists, but I'm not convinced there aren't any like that where the base name is red). Specific parenthetical disambiguators can probably be botted; see Wikipedia:Database reports/Specific unnecessary disambiguations. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:27, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

SD0001, I'll be honest I've not done much in the way of database reports, could we get this unnecessary dab report refreshed? Primefac (talk) 15:50, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

The bot isn't updating because there's no |interval= param. I've added it now for 30 days - feel free to adjust if more frequent updates are desired. It's also possible to just hit "Update the table now" for an on-demand update. – SD0001 (talk) 16:07, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Didn't even think to look at the page code for that sort of thing. Primefac (talk) 16:18, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

TenPoundHammer, from my work on Wikipedia:Missing redirects project I obtained User:Qwerfjkl/sandbox/55, which BD2412 organized. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:57, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

Well, this is quite it then. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 21:01, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl: I have been meaning to ask your permission to subdivide that page, as it is of rather unwieldy length. Cheers! BD2412 T 21:49, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

BD2412, by all means. — Qwerfjkltalk 22:28, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl: sweet, that's a big help Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 00:46, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

So could all discrete subsets be moved by bot, provided that the page without "(parenthetical)" still does not exist or redirects to the disambiguated title? Wikiwerner (talk) 17:40, 15 March 2026 (UTC)

Wikiwerner, these need to be handled on a case-by-case basis in general. — Qwerfjkltalk 10:53, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Why? I think it wold be a reasonable bot request to take a specific disambiguator and move all pages with that disambiguator where the base name either has never existed or is a single-revision redirect to the disambiguated page and move them to the base name. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 13:30, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

In fact, I was originally going to code this task, but seeing the discussion so far, I paused because I am not sure we want to, even though I think we should too. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 13:57, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

If someone wants to modify User:Plastikspork/massmove.js to strip out suffixes, any admin would be able to batch-remove disambiguators such as (film). It should theoretically just require shifting your lookup value from the front to the back of the string, but I'm pulled in a few too many directions at the moment so I'm not sure if I'm able to do this myself. Primefac (talk) 15:15, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

It really was that easy; User:Primefac/massmove2.js allows for stripping of suffixes. Primefac (talk) 15:44, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, duh! Vanderwaalforces (talk) 18:38, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

There are only a few hundred (film) and (band) articles in the dbase report, and we can add other values to the report based on the discussion below. I figure to minimise disruption maybe do batches of forty or fifty at a time spread out over a couple of days. Primefac (talk) 10:23, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

I do have concerns that we may end up automating "primary topic" status to a bunch of titles that do not merit that over the title redirecting elsewhere. BD2412 T 14:39, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

I was only planning on moving pages that have a redlinked base name. Primefac (talk) 18:42, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Pppery, what are some examples of disambiguators that you think could be safely stripped? — Qwerfjkltalk 17:03, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

Automatically add Template:AI-retrieved source

Since we have Template:AI-retrieved source, it would be nice if a bot could add this template to refs based on whether they have the utm_source parameter set to a LLM value. (See User:Headbomb/unreliable for a list of these utm_source values).

Sources that were manually verified by someone can simply be marked as "good" by removing the utm_source parameter. Laura240406 (talk) 21:56, 19 January 2026 (UTC)

I would be interested in developing this (n.b. I see that {{AI-retrieved source}} suggests either adding a |checked= parameter or commenting out the template rather than modifying the source URL). — chrs || talk 02:46, 20 January 2026 (UTC)

We could also change the citation templats, so that if the URL parameter contains e.g. "UTM_source=chatgpt.com", then {{AI-retrieved source}} is added at the end of the citation. Wikiwerner (talk) 11:36, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Bloxx website creation Bot

I am building a website builder and SEO optimization tool, users by default customers bring in their Socials across yelp, google reviews, instragram et cetera by way of google places API.

One thing that signals trust is also a wikipedia page with founding date and basics of the company. For the established businesses with important context, i'd like to automatically create the wikipedia pages via the API with the important details on the company to signal trust. Jamespentalow (talk) 00:13, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Jamespentalow, Wikipedia is not intended as a directory or something to signal trust, but an encyclopedia. As an encyclopedia, there are criteria for inclusion. The criteria for inclusion for companies is at WP:NCORP. This is a generally higher bar, and thus it's harder to get an article on a company than it is to get one on most other topics. We require high-quality, independent, and reliable sources for articles, and right now there is not an AI or other automated software that can gather these, let alone write an article. If you think the company meets WP:NCORP, you're free to take a stab at writing an article about it yourself and going through the Articles for creation process. However, the task is Impossible for a bot. HurricaneZeta^C 01:31, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Reference spam detector

Moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam § refspam bot

I would like to see a bot that would detect likely Reference spam, and generate a confidence score internally, the way User:Cluebot NG does. Ideally, at high levels of confidence, perhaps it could just revert as Cluebot does, but in any case, it ought to generate a project page with a table or log of rated edits so that humans could review the results, comment, perhaps define a confidence threshold for auto-reverts, and of course, provide data for refining and tuning the algorithm.

I seem to be spending more and more time analyzing and reverting WP:REFSPAM, and a lot of them are very obvious and really should not need human intervention. If someone is a new editor, adds substantially the same citation to multiple articles, with no added content (or brief, near-identical content), and has few or no edits outside one topic area (i.e., an WP:SPA), odds are very high they are a ref spammer. Mathglot (talk) 01:34, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

@Mathglot: this is programmatically possible, a little difficult and time-consuming — but possible. I have a few questions, would it be okay if we continue the discussion on your or my talkpage? —usernamekiran (talk) 08:37, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

usernamekiran, sure, let's move it, but let's find a more public Wikipedia page or WikiProject page where we have a prayer of attracting other interested comment. Perhaps Wikipedia talk:Spam (540 watchers, 56 pageviews/mo.) or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam (1,218 / 1,926), or a subpage of one of them to centralize possibly extended commentary? My knowledge in this field is ancient now, but I wonder if we compiled a grab-bag of possible features (to add to the four I listed), generated a test set of a few hundred human-assessed spam evaluations, and threw a machine learning bot at it with the feature set, whether that might generate a usable model, at least as proof of concept. Likely with all the advances in AI, some of that can be streamlined, maybe even the assessments? That would be a win. Mathglot (talk) 09:19, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

That's even better, I should have thought of that. I have a primary workflow in my mind, only for creating the report(s). In the early phase, the bot should rely on heuristics instead of machine learning. Once we create a good confidence scoring mechanism, we can move to next phase of reverting the edits. But during first phase, we will need inputs from other users on reports — to cross-verify the suspected spam links. In few hours, I will copy-paste this conversation, and detailed workflow on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam, and notify few relevant venues of the discussion. Once we create a workflow/logic, I can start on concrete programming. During the discussion, I will create code for detecting the URLs being inserted, associating them with users/articles, and other basic necessary stuff. —usernamekiran (talk) 23:28, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

• moved. —usernamekiran (talk) 02:28, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Coding... a base/skeleton code has been created, but given the complexity, this would take at least a month to go fully operational in bot's user-space, and to collect enough data. It would take at least a month or two after that to go live in mainspace/BRFA. —usernamekiran (talk) 08:17, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Adding Wikilinks to Multiple Articles

I am wanting to see if there is potentially a way to automate the adding of Wikilinks to all articles that have listed or otherwise have Bruce Dukov mentioned in the contents of the article. This is an entry I recently created (after it was initially deleted in 2006), and there are about 290 articles that mention Mr. Dukov individually (not in infoboxes, it seems) in the text of the article. I am wanting to see if those mentions could be automatically linked, essentially. Please let me know if this is possible.

Sincerely, PootisHeavy (talk) 22:48, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

WP:AWB is probably the best option for this. BilledMammal (talk) 03:45, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ}} Primefac (talk) 17:20, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

Categorisation of uncategorised redirects

I am unfamiliar with bots, and have no idea if this is a bad idea or not (it may very well overload the server or something).

Would it be a good idea to have a bot automatically put redirects with no categorisation into it's own maintenance category, so editors can fix it? (See WP:RCAT) Jacksonvil (talk|contribs) 05:29, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

I think a database report might be better for this, based on the sheer scale. One might already exist though, I'm not sure. ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 08:50, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Correct (about using a report, that is). Primefac (talk) 10:29, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing me to the notice of this. I will have a look. Jacksonvil (talk|contribs) 11:29, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ}} Jacksonvil (alt) (talk) (contribs) (Main account) 05:21, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

Useless non-free no reduce tags

{{Non-free no reduce}} is intended to keep a bot (I think it is DatBot (talk · contribs)) from downsizing large non-free images to no more than 100k square pixels. Therefore, it is redundant and pointless if an image with size ≤100k has this tag. I recently found an image File:Gangbusters title.png that had this tag with a size of 418×239 px (99902 px²). –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 21:16, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

This page is for bot requests. Are you requesting a bot? SeaDragon1 (talk, contributions) 16:11, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes, because this is an issue that is trivial to handle and likely to recur in the future. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 04:40, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

So from a bot perspective, how often (generally speaking) does this sort of thing happen? Primefac (talk) 12:56, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

Looks like there are currently 204 such images, 41 with the latest file revision in 2025 and one so far in 2026. There are also four audio files with the tag: File:J Dilla - Don't Cry.ogg, File:J Dilla - Time, The Donut of the Heart.ogg, File:Jane Remover - Dreamflasher.ogg, and File:Kanye West - Blood on the Leaves.ogg.

I note 57 of the 204 are in Category:Sports uniforms, 54 of them last uploaded in 2024. Many appear to be templated images showing two variations of a uniform, in contrast to others (over 100000px²) that have three variations (e.g. File:ECM-Uniform-PHI.png vs File:ECA-Uniform-DET.png), which makes me suspect they started tagging all new template images with {{Non-free no reduce}}. Anomie⚔ 19:55, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

@27JJ: This is you who uploaded the latest version of sports uniforms. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 19:57, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I’ve been applying the tag consistently across template-based uploads to prevent unintended resizing. This was inherited from other contributors. Since it’s unnecessary for images under 100k px, I’ll adjust moving forwards. Feel free to clean up existing files where needed. 27JJ (talk) 20:32, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Bot request: Automated citation metadata verification against external APIs

I'd like to propose a bot that automatically verifies citation metadata in Wikipedia articles by cross-referencing structured fields in citation templates against external APIs. Specifically:

• DOIs resolved via the CrossRef API, comparing the returned title and authors against the values in the {{cite journal}} or {{cite book}} template
• PMIDs looked up via the NCBI PubMed E-utilities API, with the same comparison
• ISBNs checked against Open Library or WorldCat

The bot would flag cases where:

• A DOI or PMID resolves to a different paper than described in the citation
• A DOI or PMID does not resolve at all
• There is a significant mismatch between the template metadata and the API-returned metadata (e.g. different title, different authors)

It would not assess whether the source supports the claim it is cited for — only whether the citation is internally consistent and points to a real, correctly identified document.

This would be useful for several reasons. First, it addresses growing concerns about LLM-generated articles introducing incorrect citation metadata (wrong DOIs, fabricated PMIDs, misattributed authors). Second, it would improve citation quality across all articles, regardless of how they were written — human editors also introduce typos, outdated DOIs, and copy-paste errors in citation fields. Third, all required APIs are free and public, making implementation straightforward.

The output could be formatted as a report similar to existing cleanup listings, or the bot could add maintenance tags like {{failed verification}} to individual citations where mismatches are detected.

I encountered this issue firsthand while working on Draft:Age and mathematical productivity, where several citation template fields (PMIDs, DOIs) contained minor errors that pointed to different papers in the same journals. These were caught manually, but an automated tool would have flagged them instantly and could do the same across all of Wikipedia's approximately 230 million citations.

Would there be interest in developing or supporting a bot like this? ~2026-20189-58 (talk) 12:27, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't know that there are growing concerns about LLM-generated articles introducing incorrect citation metadata. Rather, there are concerns (not growing, but already in full bloom) about LLM-generated material making its way into Wikipedia, in prose as well as hallucinated sources.

The proposed bot would instead hide evidence of LLM generation. In the case of DOIs and PMIDs, these are typically copied and pasted into the template by the editor, so there would be no typographical errors.

I would prefer such a bot not correct the DOI, PMID, or ISBN, but flag them with an appropriate superscript label like ^{possibly hallucinated} or something more concise. And this should happen in mainspace and draftspace. ~Anachronist (who / me) (talk) 14:20, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Good idea. The important part is that suspicious sources are properly flagged to make review easier. ~2026-20189-58 (talk) 14:29, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

This is something I could do, but it would need to be discussed somewhere first as I wonder how much traction it would gather. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 09:10, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I would like to see a tool that can legitimately verify the ISBN metadata vs. the citation metadata. However there is no public API for that. Often the APIs conflates work vs. edition. US vs UK edition. Hardcover vs paperback. etc.. untangling these messes is not a simple API query. The more you lean on APIs the more of a mess it creates. It copies mistakes from the API datasets into Wikipedia. CitationBot has been doing this for years, tagging citations with whatever ISBN it can find. Then you have a split brain problem: ISBN points to one edition, metadata points to a different edition. -- GreenC 20:53, 12 April 2026 (UTC)

Automatically notify people who are being discussed at ANI

It's not uncommon for people to forget to notify the people they are complaining about. Could we have a bot detect if a username is inserted as a parameter in the {{userlinks}} template and the user hasn't already had an ANI notice about that thread? This could make sending notices simpler; instead of opening a thread and then going around to talk pages, you just use the template and the bot notifies people for you. This would save time for the OP and for people who have to notify when the OP forgets. QwertyForest (talk) 14:56, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is a good task. First, people are supposed to notify users that have ANI threads made about them. Which means that very often, if not in most cases, other users that are mentioned are incidental to what's being discussed.

E.g. User:Bob keeps vandalizing the subpages of User:Example, see Special:Contributions/Bob.

User:Example here doesn't need to be notified.

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:15, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

When a username is put into the {{userlinks}} template, the user is probably not incidental. Even if a bot was going to notify everyone mentioned whether or not the template was used, User:Example may still appreciate an invitation to the discussion about a user they have been affected by. However, if you wanted to limit messages to the people the thread is about, having the bot only do it with {{userlinks}} usernames should work. QwertyForest (talk) 17:14, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

How exactly is the bot supposed to tell if someone has gotten an ANI notice? Template:ANI-notice is the most widely used method of notifying, but it isn't required to use that specific template. 45dogs (they/them) (talk page) (contributions) 17:36, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

I think you've found a problem. I was expecting it to work with the normal template, but custom messages would confuse it. Do you see a way around that? QwertyForest (talk) 18:41, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

I can't think of anything foolproof. The bot looking for links to ANI might be sufficient, but it wouldn't be perfect. 'Notice' is a vague enough term to classify such notifications as "hey you are in a report at ANI" as probably sufficient to meet the threshold, which doesn't use any links. 45dogs (they/them) (talk page) (contributions) 19:52, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

I think there’s a benefit in human notification in filling out the reason for the notification. That said, the bot could look at mentions on a delay and check the users talk page to see if a link is present. The bot would only notify if the target page has not been linked at the user’s talk page. Dw31415 (talk) 19:57, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Remove background color from List of wars involving the Kingdom of France

Many of the results are simply not linear enough to be assigned to a color. This article should have all background colors removed from the outcome column like on List of wars involving Spain. Otherwise there will always be disagreement on the supposedly "straightforward" outcome of a war. Not to mention the vandalizing no-name accounts like to do on these types of articles (plus the edit war that's literally going on right now). Bubba6t3411 (talk) 17:02, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Does this involve a Bot? Dw31415 (talk) 17:52, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

This is not the correct venue for this request. The article's talk page should be used to achieve consensus. If consensus to remove the backgrounds is achieved, a bot is not needed; a simple find and replace of the background styling should be easy for anyone with a little text-editor experience. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:16, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

The talk page for List of wars involving Spain is the right venue. See WP:RFCBEFORE for a list of dispute resolution methods. Dw31415 (talk) 11:10, 16 April 2026 (UTC)

Change parameters in Women in Red template

The Women in Red project have renumbered a couple of their events (please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red#Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/2016 Women in Philosophy Drive). We would like parameters changed in the template as follows:

• {{WikiProject Women in Red|2017}} → {{WikiProject Women in Red|32a}}
• {{WikiProject Women in Red|2018}} → {{WikiProject Women in Red|63a}}

Please note that other parameters may also exist, which should be preserved, e.g.

• {{WikiProject Women in Red|31|2017|35}} → {{WikiProject Women in Red|31|32a|35}}
• {{WikiProject Women in Red|2018|68}} → {{WikiProject Women in Red|63a|68}}

Please do not change the year parameter, e.g.

• {{WikiProject Women in Red|year=2017}} → {{WikiProject Women in Red|year=2017}}

Pages to be processed are:

• Category:WikiProject Women in Red meetup 2017 articles (0)
• Category:WikiProject Women in Red meetup 2018 articles (0)

Thank you — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 04:07, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

I will file a BRFA today or tomorrow when I get some time. – DreamRimmer ■ 10:25, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

It was tomorrow yesterday :)) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:23, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

BRFA filed – DreamRimmer ■ 14:05, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Marking as {{done}}. – DreamRimmer ■ 14:57, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

Pywikibot script to award barnstar automatically

Hi. Anyone can help me on creating pywikibot script to award barnstar automatically? Hope for positive response. Fade258 (talk) 16:05, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

Which event do you want to distribute awards for? – DreamRimmer ■ 16:34, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

@DreamRimmer, Regarding this drive Fade258 (talk) 16:36, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

@DreamRimmer. Is it possible? Fade258 (talk) 06:07, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

@DreamRimmer, Please look at this code and help me on rectifying. Fade258 (talk) 06:43, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

It's possible. I will write one for you. – DreamRimmer ■ 09:33, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

@DreamRimmer, Thank you so much for your assistance. Fade258 (talk) 10:00, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

You can find the script here. Please set Run to true to award users and false to print messages. Parsing may not be fully reliable, as the GAN backlog drive pages are inconsistent across drives. You shouldn't have any issues with the February drive or future drives that follow the same format. I see that some users have already received their awards, so I have added a variable to skip them. In future, it would be better to keep a list of users and points on a separate page or txt file instead of taking data from drive pages, as that would be more reliable. – DreamRimmer ■ 11:43, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

@DreamRimmer. Thank You so much for providing the script. I will do it. Can you please provide me a script by adding list of users and points in txt file? Guide me I will do that. I hope for positive response. Fade258 (talk) 12:50, 1 May 2026 (UTC)

Main article links to non-English Wikipedias

Please could a bot-op (or other person who knows how) generate a list of articles that use the {{main}} template with a link to a non-English Wikipedia, e.g. {{main|:fr:Siège de Marseille (1524)}}, grouped by destination Wiki. If the list is short, please place it directly in the discussion at Template talk:Main#Main article link to non-English Wikipedia. If the list is (in your opinion) too long for there, please create it as a separate page somewhere suitable (my userspace is fine) and put a link to it there. Thanks, Thryduulf (talk) 15:46, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't see that this would need a bot. Seems like a reasonably simple regex to get a list of articles in the {{main|: format. I suppose going through and listing them per Wikipedia would be the issue Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 16:03, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Thryduulf, like this search? — Qwerfjkltalk 17:01, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

I didn't know you could do regex searches! Exporting the results to a list would be easier to work through, but that is certainly better than iterating through language codes 1 by 1 that was all I knew how to do. Thryduulf (talk) 17:22, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Thryduulf, that's easy enough to do with AWB, JWB, or pagepile. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:30, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm going to use https://petscan.wmcloud.org/?psid=46902942 for use on the linked discussion. Primefac (talk) 19:11, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Change "Yokohama" (template call) to "Yokohama Rubber Company"

I moved the template Template:Yokohama (an icon of a tire company) to Template:Yokohama Rubber Company to make room for a navigational template about the city of Yokohama.

However existing calls for "Yokohama" (which must be replaced before I can insert the city navigational template) number over 500. I need all instances of {{Yokohama}} changed to {{Yokohama Tire Company}} so no existing tire-related pages are affected by me inserting a navigational template in the "Yokohama" space.

Thanks, WhisperToMe (talk) 03:48, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a good use for a bot indeed. Is the new template up and working? Can you share a diff where you have successfully changed it? Dw31415 (talk) 19:55, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

The template does not yet exist.

You could also just name the new template Template:Yokohama city or Template:Yokohama (city) per similar city names for navboxes you've created.

For what it's worth I've been planning on nominating {{Yokohama}} and other tire templates for deletion, so give me a few days (and make your navbox!) to sort that out; it's been somewhat low on my priority list but I'll bump it up. Primefac (talk) 10:04, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! I started it at Template:Yokohama (city) WhisperToMe (talk) 04:27, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Arbitration enforcement editnotices

I'm seeking comment on an idea for a bot to automatically create editnotices (including templates like Template:Contentious topics/Arab-Israeli editnotice when pages are edited) for pages that are protected as an arbitration enforcement action (for either/both pages that are protected in future & for those currently protected). User:ClerkBot automatically categorises such protections already, over at Wikipedia:Arbitration enforcement log/Protections, and it seems tedious to manually create editnotices for each page, which I believe is the status quo.

I'm not sure if there would be a more efficient way to implement such an idea, such as using a module(?), but if a bot is the right idea, I'd be willing to write it and carry it through consensus-seeking, BRFA, and operation. A couple of questions here:

• Is there a more efficient way to implement the idea?
• The bot would need to create many pages, in the format of this manual edit, meaning WP:MASSCREATE would apply. Is there any technical barrier here, or is it simply the consensus of the community?
• The bot would need pagemover or template editor permissions to override the title blacklist. Would this be a technical issue?
• On the non-technical side: does the community even want this bot...is it a good idea? Sysops, template editors, and pagemovers, would you find a task like this useful? (If this thread is encouraging, my plan is to go to WP:VPPROP for consensus for the task.)

Thanks for your input. Best, Staraction (talk · contribs) 13:47, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

While this is not an argument for opposing a bot, I would assume many such protection actions are done by Twinkle (I know not all admins prefer it). It might be possible to include this automation in Twinkle itself.

@Staraction, regarding some of your questions, neither WP:MASSCREATE nor granting pagemover (which I think is technically enough and preferred for such a task) would be any problem, provided consensus for doing the task in the first place is there.

Notified: Wikipedia talk:TW. ~~~~

~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 15:52, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Editnotice § Creating editnotices lists the locations for namespace-specific edit notices. For instance, the one for mainspace is located at Template:Editnotices/Namespace/Main. Its implementation invokes Module:Mainspace editnotice, which could be modified to check for some suitable indicator (if one exists) that a page has been protected for a specific purpose. isaacl (talk) 22:14, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

I believe this is how Template:BLP editnotice works, where the indicator is "either Category:Living people or Category:Possibly living people". I don't think there's a similar category for the different protection reasons, and the {{ARBPIA}} template might not always be present on the article's talk page. Is there another indicator that might be relevant here, other than the category? Staraction (talk · contribs) 07:33, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

• I'd love to see anything that can manage the tedious clerical tasks at AE. Valereee (talk) 12:51, 18 April 2026 (UTC)
• Could the existing logger bot add these, maybe? ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 13:33, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

  @ScottishFinnishRadish: I think that'd certainly be easiest, although it would be up to @L235 (courtesy ping!) of course. Staraction (talk · contribs) 18:08, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

I have began a thread at the village pump to seek consensus for this task. Best, Staraction (talk · contribs) 06:22, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Marking as {{BOTREQ}} per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/StaractionBot 2. Tenshi! (Talk page) 15:31, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Replace all redirects of Israel-Hamas war with Gaza war

Link replacement: Israel–Hamas war → Gaza war

Task: Mass-replace text/wikilinks inside "Past/Current Events" portal pages and all article pages.

Find: Israel–Hamas war (and piped variations like [[Israel–Hamas war|). See Special:Whatlinkshere/Israel–Hamas war

Replace with: Gaza war

Reason: The primary page target was moved to Gaza war, and past event sub-pages need cleanup. ~2026-28818-51 (talk) 05:30, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Not a good task for a bot. See WP:NOTBROKEN. Wikiwerner (talk) 11:34, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Clean up electrified = yes in Infobox station

"Electrified" in {{Infobox station}} belogns to history part. It should whire the time of electrification, but not "Yes" or "No". Benteds (talk) 03:16, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Looks like about 5k pages (4k yes and 800 no) so a bot would probably be best. As a short-term solution (which might just fix the problem anyway) I'll add in some tracking cats and logic to prevent the yes/no from showing in the articles. Primefac (talk) 12:08, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Happy to knock this one out. I've already got the logic written, and I've tested it with about 50 supervised edits. I'll submit a BRFA shortly. Also as a side note, it might be worth changing the parameter name to {{{electrified_date}}} or something. Paging @Zackmann08 who might have some ideas. phuzion (talk) 14:55, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Phuzion large number of conflicting parameters in this one... Up to you whether to do this as one run or two... If the parameter is supposed to display when it was electrified, then the label should also be changed to reflect that. Full support changing to |electrified_date= though. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 14:59, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

I've already done a manual run of 50 pages all of which looked good to me. I think this should be a fairly straightforward request, so BRFA filed. phuzion (talk) 15:14, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Sounds good. Get er done! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 15:15, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

You could say I got er {{done}}. phuzion (talk) 18:28, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

As a follow up, this entire template is going to require a bot run in the near future to convert up the Location map to the new module... Again, can be a separate bot run, or we can do it all at once? Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 15:00, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

It can be a separate run. You can replace the should-soon-be-deprecated |electrified= with |electrified_date= during that run. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:25, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

WP:AWB/RTP can also be updated to reflect this, though it might be worth clearing out the yes/no values first. Primefac (talk) 16:50, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Fixing link from location article to race track.

I need to replace all wikilinks from New York State Fairgrounds to Syracuse Mile in AAA/USAC/NASCAR championship season articles where the link specifically refers to the race track rather than the fairgrounds complex. Thx. Mark McWire (talk) 03:44, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Not a good task for a bot. Context issues, and only ~150 links anyway so would be better to be done manually or via WP:AWB. Primefac (talk) 09:22, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Okay, I will it change myself with manual edits. --Mark McWire (talk) 23:14, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Bot to make Wikipedia a better place

Bot Name: InyaBot Inyamad (talk) 06:24, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

This is a page for requesting tasks to be done by bots. What task would you like performed by a bot? Dw31415 (talk) 08:06, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Anti vandal? If not possible, a typo corrector. Inyamad (talk) 11:21, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Mass text and link update: Sierra Leone Cricket Association → Cricket Sierra Leone

The governing body for cricket in Sierra Leone has officially rebranded from the 'Sierra Leone Cricket Association' to 'Cricket Sierra Leone' (the main article has already been updated). Could a bot please perform a find-and-replace across all articles to update both the links and the text from 'Sierra Leone Cricket Association' to 'Cricket Sierra Leone'? Thank you! Elison Pokhrel ^TALK 03:12, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Not a good task for a bot. See WP:NOTBROKEN. Primefac (talk) 10:26, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Rather than WP:NOTBROKEN, I'd point to WP:CONTEXTBOT and the fact that a search turns up only about 20 instances of the phrase. Someone could easily do this manually. Anomie⚔ 11:58, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Elison Pokhrel ^TALK 13:02, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Update locations in America with the 2020 census information

it has been over 6 years and many wikipedia articles still list the 2010 census as the most recent ~2026-26422-81 (talk) 10:39, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Should we not have this data come from WikiData? Feels odd to have it native to en. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 10:54, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Do you have any ideas on how a bot could help? Dw31415 (talk) 13:52, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

This is related to Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchive1222#Automated_editing_in_census-designated_place_articles that began around the same time. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 08:21, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

I agree with Vilenski's suggestion of implementing a Wikidata system including all United States Census data of an appropriate type (probably just population, gender, and race in the generic case). –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 08:24, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

Remove visible "double sentence spacing"

Per MOS:DOUBLESPACE, punctuation marks should be followed by a single (visible) space; however, currently we have ~2000 pages that use .  (period followed by a non-breaking space and a regular space), which renders as a doubled space. See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#DOUBLESPACE for details. Please run a bot to go over these articles and remove such spurious   occurrences. (Some of them are not related to double sentence spacing, but are still erroneous, so removing them should not make things worse. Other cases of MOS:DOUBLESPACE violation, such as using .{{nbsp}} , are much less common and will be easier to correct manually.) — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 23:59, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm not 100% sure I read that discussion as indicating we need to fix these, but I also note that it has gone on at least three different tangents... I'm fine coding it up (simple find/replace) but I just want to make sure that the discussion in question really is giving approval for this task. Primefac (talk) 21:41, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Sure. It seems that nobody objects the intention but some people started warring on wording (unrelated to the actual problem), which I really did not expect when making this request. Let's wait until that discussion settles down... — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 01:56, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

@Primefac: that discussion has apparently settled down, also with a consensus to run the bot. When you find time to run the task, please also do the same with ,   – there are several hundred pages with such occurrences, more or less all of which should be eliminated. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 21:20, 17 May 2026 (UTC)

Cool, I'll try to get a BRFA filed at some point this week. Primefac (talk) 08:09, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

BRFA filed Primefac (talk) 12:19, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Foreign relations redirect cleanup

{{resolved}} If "Foo–Bar relations" is an article, and any of the following pages is a redirect to "Foreign relations of Foo" or "Foreign relations of Bar", then these should be repointed to the article:

• "Bar-Foo relations"
• "Bar – Foo relations" (spaced dashes were in vogue once)
• "Foo – Bar relations"
• "Bar - Foo relations" (the same thing with a keyboard hyphen)
• "Foo - Bar relations"

I would estimate there are several thousand of these to fix right now, and then a trickle of one every few days.

* Pppery * _{in solidarity} 02:44, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Found only 35 redirects to fix from this query. Redirecting them shortly.

– DreamRimmer ■ 04:04, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Repointed. – DreamRimmer ■ 04:10, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Wow, I was expecting there to be a lot more. I guess that proves Wikipedia is never what you expect - sometimes what you think is a big problem is a tiny one and sometimes something that looks trivial sprawls into a mess. * Pppery * _{in solidarity} 04:34, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

100% – DreamRimmer ■ 07:45, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

Correcting user GA count after user page moved

Not sure if this is the perfect place for this and please let me know if there's a better resource. I submitted a GA nomination a while back under my prior username User:RyanAl6. Between the time I submitted the GA and the time it got approved, I changed my username. Now, the new GA is not showing up in my GA count when nominating/reviewing other GAs. I was wondering if a bot could fix this? Thanks. VaguelyVogue (RyanAl6) (talk) 18:16, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

Which article are you referring to? You seem to have one GA which is correctly attributed to your new username, and none to your old username. – SD0001 (talk) 11:46, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Request for bot to perform automated task related to MOS:POSLINK

I'm requesting that a task be created for a bot to perform the following action per MOS:POSLINK that has very little chance of having any false positives:

Replace [[Foo|Foo's]] with [[Foo]]'s.

This can probably be a task that runs an indefinite amount of times, probably once every month or so. Steel1943 (talk) 21:38, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

Is there any consensus for a bot to mass replace these for MOS:POSLINK though? Tenshi! (Talk page) 21:43, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

WP:BOTREQUIRE doesn't require that, and the content of MOS:POSLINK was formed by a RfC. But, if that route needs to be taken, by all means, bureaucracy away! Steel1943 (talk) 21:48, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

This seems like a WP:COSMETICBOT to me. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:52, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Interesting, didn't know that existed. (But, then again, I don't read the bot policy page that much.) Whatever happens here happens, but either way, this policy was recently formed via consensus and this type of change has ... almost no false positive chance. Steel1943 (talk) 21:55, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

Technically not WP:COSMETICBOT, as it does make a difference to the rendering of the link. Anomie⚔ 00:22, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

It does not make a difference in the rendering of the link. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 05:38, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

It does, though. Foo's is different from Foo's. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 06:06, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

@Vanderwaalforces: It may be difficult to see, but notice the differences between how the "'s" is linked in both the links Myceteae made above. Steel1943 (talk) 20:18, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Maybe I was understanding "rendering" differently. But why I said there's no difference is that both of them have the same href= and title= values, only the display text is different. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 21:30, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

COSMETICBOT rules are primarily about whether the rendered HTML differs between the two edits. Removing whitespace does not affect how the page is rendered. Changing the formatting of a URL from Foo's to Foo's does affect the HTML output of the page. In my opinion, this does not count as a cosmetic edit. phuzion (talk) 17:07, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'm not objecting to this, was just wondering if there was or not. Tenshi! (Talk page) 21:53, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

Oh, I was thinking that your question was based off of it being some kind of prerequisite to perform such a task (as I would've expected from a place that has editors that are probably rather technical.) My apologies for the misunderstanding. Steel1943 (talk) 21:57, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

As I understand, there is no requirement that bot requests must have consensus beforehand, although for contentious tasks (e.g. an adminbot that deletes G13'd drafts) it would likely need a consensus to run such a bot. Tenshi! (Talk page) 22:09, 31 January 2026 (UTC)

I think for a task that is borderline COSMETICBOT like this one, even if not strictly required, it would be a good idea to get consensus beforehand. — Qwerfjkltalk 14:10, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

It looks like there was an RFC that created a subsection of the MOS that indicates that we shouldn't have the 's inside of links. I'd say that's a pretty good consensus. I'll see if I can come up with something. Primefac (talk) 20:18, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

I'd say that's a pretty good consensus. Agreed. This bot would straightforwardly correct clear cut violations of MOS:POSLINK, a recent addition to the MOS which made following a well-attended and near-unanimous RFC. Thanks @Primefac for working on this and thank you to @Steel1943 for suggesting this fix. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:38, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Any updates on this? Steel1943 (talk) 18:52, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

No. It's still on my list. Primefac (talk) 11:44, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

Restoring thread from Archive 88. I had forgotten about this until I go the notification that this thread I subscribed to had been archived. @Primefac: is this still on your radar? —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 23:12, 7 May 2026 (UTC)

Seems to have fallen off, but I can put it back on my list. (one of these days I'll actually write down said list...) Primefac (talk) 12:03, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! I appreciate it. FYI @Steel1943 —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 14:32, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

This could be added to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos, I believe. Not sure how to search for [[(...)|\1's]] or [[(...)|$1's]] using mw:Help:CirrusSearch TBH. Ponor (talk) 15:59, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

There might be a bit of a CONTEXTBOT issue... I'm still refining my regex search but in the first 20 hits was [[Moody's Ratings|Moody's]] which (correctly) shows up as Moody's but would be "incorrectly" shown as Moody's if the task were to run. I'm also pretty sure that Broca's is correct but not 100% confident on that one, but if it is then that's a 10% failure rate which is usually my cut-off for feeling comfortable with a bot run. Primefac (talk) 10:38, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

Interesting problems, thanks for sharing, and for working on this! Yes, Moody's is correct and Moody's is incorrect. Broca area (note the redirect) and Broca's area are both correct but "Broca's" is, I think, the more common rendering and regardless if that's the style being used it should be part of the link. Ideally this would only fix wikilinks like [[Foo|Foo's]] and ignore [[Foo's bar|Foo's]]. In other words, only when the text on both sides of the pipe is identical except for the addition of the final 's on the right side. This would miss things like [[Franklin D. Roosevelt|Roosevelt's]] but the goal is to pick up unambiguous MOS:POSLINK violations with a minimal error rate. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 18:48, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

Added a constraint and it seems to have levelled those out. I'll see about checking the first hundred or so. Primefac (talk) 20:18, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

Just to clarify, all those will be excluded. If so, that part looks good! —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:24, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

Wait... so you don't want everything that search picked up to be changed? Primefac (talk) 20:31, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

When I look at the first few results from the search you linked, I see things like [[2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)|Arthur C. Clarke's]] and [[2001: A Space Odyssey|Stanley Kubrick's]] which should not be changed. The text on both side of the pipe should be identical except for the final 's. I'm not sure how else to explain it. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:50, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

But yet [[George Washington|Washington]]'s is given as an example of what should be changed at POSLINK. So we have some <foo|foo's> that obviously need to change, and <full name|surname's> that should be changed, but any other piped link should be kept... starting to get that context issue concern again. Primefac (talk) 20:58, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

To be clear, most of the examples *are* MOS:POSLINK violations. Maybe the Clarke–Kubrick examples (from Artificial intelligence) are an outlier but it caught my eye. There's also an example from Kazakhstan with [[Kazakhstan national football team|men's]], [[Kazakhstan women's national football team|women's]] to refer to the men's and women's national football teams. That one could be argued either way but the way it appears in the article now is acceptable. I haven't looked at enough of these to get a sense of the true "error" rate. If we restrict it to only [[foo|foo's]] then the error rate should be very low but it will leave behind a lot of POSLINK violations. If it could get the full name–surname thing right that would be a big win, since this is very often used with personal names. Basically, the more distinct the two sides of the pipe are, the more likely it is to be an acceptable use. The vast majority will still be unacceptable. I can't say for certain that it's >90%. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:06, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

To put it another way, from the standpoint of the MOS, almost all of these need to change. I can't speak for Steel but my hope for this was to at least take care of the very lowest hanging fruit while accepting that it would still leave behind a large number of POSLINK violations. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:18, 9 May 2026 (UTC)

Yep, all of this discussion is the exact reason why I'm only suggesting "[[Foo|Foo's]] to [[Foo]]'s" and absolutely nothing else ... almost 0% chance of false positives. Steel1943 (talk) 11:58, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Any news? Steel1943 (talk) 06:27, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Context issues threw me off, haven't really had a chance to find a good middle ground to propose for the BRFA (I think there is still a reasonable argument to be made for a slight expansion of your proposal immediately above). Primefac (talk) 12:39, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

Keep us posted. I remain in favor of sticking with the original, limited proposal though I acknowledge it will leave behind many POSLINK violations. —Myceteae‍🌈 (talk) 15:00, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

Been travelling recently but I should have more time after next week, at the very least I think I can sort out how far to stretch the cases. Primefac (talk) 20:26, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a good job for two separate tasks maybe? The expansion has so many edge cases that I'm not sure it could ever be fully automatic. FlammablePizza (talk) 19:44, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

This would be a one-time run, with maybe second down the line, allowing future instances to be dealt with by the gnomes (and possibly a database report). Primefac (talk) 20:25, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Made this script fairly quickly, tried a few manual edits and it seems to complete the originally suggested task just fine. Just leaving it here as a starting point. https://gitlab.com/flammablepizza/FlammableBot/-/blob/main/task2.py FlammablePizza (talk) 20:45, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

(This is a reply to both of you.) If the 'basic' vision can be run sooner rather than later, I would see this as a real benefit, even while it leaves behind more complex POSLINK violations. The 'expansion' case would ultimately be great if there is high confidence that the kinks are worked out. But if it is too hard to get right, I don't see why we should prolong deploying the basic case indefinitely. Both could be useful as a database report. Motivated editors could hack away at them and leave the appropriate ones behind. Although if there are >100k of these expansion cases it's not a real manageable wordlist. Thanks to both of you for continuing to investigate this. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:02, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Just had my bot do a dry-run by generating a list of 200 edit diffs. Going through them, all seems to be fine. Ultimately, I don't believe there is any harm in going ahead and taking care of all of these simple changes - it will just greatly reduce work any future enhanced bot would have to do. For the moment, I'll leave this up for further discussion though. FlammablePizza (talk) 22:24, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Update: BRFA submitted for the requested basic bot. Leaving this request open though if someone would like to make an enhanced bot that tackles the rest. FlammablePizza (talk) 23:32, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! FYI @Steel1943 —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 23:56, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Marking as {{BOTREQ}} as the BRFA was approved. Tenshi! (Talk page) 12:04, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, all, for moving this forward to fruition! —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:30, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

WP:Missing Wikipedians

There were 3 Afd attempts for WP:Missing Wikipedians and it survived them. Rightly so, I think. But I have serious doubts about the quality of the hand edited data there. I think a rather simple bot can generate that page once a month, and a table that can be analyzed. There is a current discussion on Village Pump ideas and people are just guessing based on their personal experiences. Let us have real data please. It would be interesting to analyze that data. Let us stop guessing why users stop. Thanks in advance. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 13:41, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Sorting Films

Hello! I've been working on a project to sort Category:United States National Film Registry films by the year they were inducted into the registry. For an example, see Category:United States National Film Registry films inducted in 1989. It's turining out to be wayyyy bigger of a project than i can handle, and it would probably be relatively simple to make a bot to do it (although i also know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about how to make bots). There's a good chart over at www.loc.gov that sorts everything by the year inducted, but it's an absolutely monumental task to sort the whole 500 on the list "by hand." If there's anything more I need to do to help, please let me know. Commandant Quacks-a-lot (talk) 21:10, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

Seems like a pretty simple task. Just parse a list of films and their years from the loc's list and check each of the article title's against it, appending "in XXXX" to category Category:United States National Film Registry films as it appears. With the somewhat small number of pages, it might be able to be a manual/semi-automatic run, but I'm not sure if that would still require the full approval process. FlammablePizza (talk) 21:39, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

Made a csv file of titles and induction years here based on the LOC site. FlammablePizza (talk) 21:46, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

That looks like a bit more than 500, probably in the range of filing a BRFA. Tenshi! (Talk page) 21:47, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, what does "parse" mean? I'm a complete ameteur at anything bot-related. Commandant Quacks-a-lot (talk) 21:52, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

It generally means reading data from a source, that frequently has complex formatting, such as a website. Here, I meant reading the list from the website and converting it into a somewhat less complicated format for a bot to read (like just a plain file of text separated by commas). FlammablePizza (talk) 21:56, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

Ah, okay. What bot should i use to run through the list? Commandant Quacks-a-lot (talk) 22:13, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

No bots have been approved yet. I have developed a script for it though, you can see a list of all changes it will make here. It is 707 articles affected, so it definitely will need a BRFA. Just need to get the BRFA filed and it will likely be a few weeks until the bot is approved (if any other bot-ops want to take over, feel free to do so; I know some of you have a lot more trust/experience in the process). FlammablePizza (talk) 23:09, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

BRFA filed. I'll run it if it gets approved and let you know. FlammablePizza (talk) 00:05, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

ooh, okay, thanks so much! Commandant Quacks-a-lot (talk) 01:24, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ}}. Created the categories, ran the bot, and manually sorted the left over pages. Looks like there are a few categories that don't have all 25 films listed, so I might try to find some of those uncategorized articles if they exist. FlammablePizza (talk) 15:59, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

Replace dead mojim.com external links with mojimlyrics.com (~100 articles)

mojim.com (魔鏡歌詞網) was a major Chinese/Japanese/English lyrics site that shut down in 2024. Its archive has been recovered and relaunched at mojimlyrics.com. Approximately 133 English Wikipedia articles contain external links to mojim.com that now return 404. All replacement URLs below have been verified live at mojimlyrics.com.

Request: Replace old mojim.com links with mojimlyrics.com equivalents per the table below. The URL structure maps cleanly (e.g. mojim.com/twh102460.htm → mojimlyrics.com/artist/102460; mojim.com/twy104149x4x7.htm → mojimlyrics.com/song/10414900040007).

Edit summary to use: Replace defunct mojim.com link with mojimlyrics.com successor (verified live)

Domains to replace: mojim.com, tw.mojim.com, httpwww.mojim.com — all http:// and https:// variants.

Moving PAM discussions into AfD

Context: since the March RfC, the historical PAM process is no longer used. Merge discussions are now held at AfD instead. But some people might not be aware of this and continue to open PAM requests (see WP:MERGEREQ).

Is it a good idea to have a bot automatically move discussions into AfD? (or at the least, notify or put a notice on the discussion.)

I am not sure if Merge bot can be modified to make this happen, or an entirely new bot created. (or the idea is just bad in the first place). Jacksonvil (alt) (talk) (contribs) (Main account) 01:51, 18 June 2026 (UTC)

It's not a bad idea, but the better idea would be editing the PAM page to make it a lot more obvious that the process has ended (which I will be doing as soon as I finish eating). Folk will figure it out when there is nowhere to put merge noms. Primefac (talk) 12:50, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

I would also note that "I want to merge A into B" is a perfectly normal thing to expect someone to do on an article's talk page, so they might even know that PAM existed. I'm not heavily invested in the process but I don't think we should be mandating that all merge discussions go through AFD. Primefac (talk) 13:36, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

It (may) be a better idea to have a notice pop up when trying to use the {{Merge to}} or {{Merge}} tags to strongly encourage the editor to use AfD. And I agree that it's fair enough for editors to assume and afd should not be mandated Jacksonvil (alt) (talk) (contribs) (Main account) 05:19, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Heya, note that all of this this is already being handled by the PAM maintainers at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/Implementing the PAM–AfD merge. You're welcome to participate if you wish. The plan we are currently following is at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/to do.

In short (and this is a very condensed summary), talk page discussions become formal PAM discussion once any editor places any of the {{PAM templates}} on the article pointing to the discussion, so we have decided to turn these templates into AfD templates. For example, {{merge to}} will be an auto-substituted wrapper of {{AfD/dated}}. If an AfD discussion is not provided or the discussion page doesn't exist, it will display an error. You can see how the new templates will look at their various testcases subpages.

We are waiting for the backlog to be cleared to implement these changes. In the meantime, we're manually moving all new PAM discussions to AfD. There are only a few new PAM discussion every week (created by editors who are accustomed to the old system), and they've been declining. Due to the way PAM was structured, a bot could never do this automatically, and there's no need: the templates will explain to the editors what they need to do. FaviFake (talk) 10:23, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Null edits needed to update Special:ShortPages

{{resolved}} Special:ShortPages has been cluttered with legitimate short article-space pages for a long time. The most recent MediaWiki software update added a magic word that can exclude pages from the report. Now all we need is for all 500K pages that transclude Template:Dmbox to be null-edited. We could wait for the job queue, but due to a couple of long-stale bugs, that can take anywhere from weeks to forever. If there is a bot with the patience to null-edit all 500K article-space pages that transclude Template:Dmbox, that would be helpful.

There is more info at Wikipedia talk:Special:ShortPages. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:45, 21 August 2026 (UTC)

500K is huge. I think the job queue is probably the best option here. It has already waited this long, so waiting a few more days shouldn't really be a problem. I can help if the job queue can't handle it. Max (talk) 17:30, 21 August 2026 (UTC)

It's huge, but T135964, a bug report that just celebrated its tenth birthday, is the problem, and a bot task is the hacky workaround that has been in place for years instead of a server-level fix. The current oldest unrefreshed article is from 8 July 2026, 44 days ago, so that's roughly how long we will have to wait for the report to catch up. In the scheme of things, waiting a month and a half for a report to be useful is something we can deal with. I was just hoping to get it fixed sooner. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:06, 21 August 2026 (UTC)

Since many of the transclusions of {{Dmbox}} would not be short pages that would be a huge waste of effort and resources. However as Special:ShortPages was nonfuctional as it was, I did process a few null edits on the shortest pages and there are now 30+ that are legitimate short articles needing review. KylieTastic (talk) 16:03, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

It may be useful to null-edit just the short pages. PetScan shows that 442 of the first 500 pages on Special:ShortPages (up to 325 bytes) use at least one template containing the magic word. (They all use Dmbox.) It might be reasonable to null-edit those 442 as a start. In fact, null-editing all 500 would probably be quicker than identifying the few pages not in need of an edit. 500 is an arbitrary limit which could, and probably should, easily be raised. Certes (talk) 18:10, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

Most of the first 500 just vanished from Special:ShortPages. I expect someone null-edited them, promoting the 326–329 byte pages (mostly false positives) into the top 500. If a bot could finish doing the first few thousand, then the first few hundred listed pages remaining on the list should be genuine reports. I could help manually but I suspect a bot would do a better job and I don't want to disrupt anyone's experiments. One option is for a bot to null-edit, say 500 pages a day, noting the size of the largest page it updated and starting from that size next run. Certes (talk) 18:57, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

I've been null-editing 1,000 pages at a time from the list as a background task, and it may be that there are other gnomes doing so as well. Somebody must be doing something, because thousands of pages have been removed from the report in the last few hours, the number of legitimate short pages at the top of the list has jumped from 38 to 135. That is excellent; the report is useful after years of not being useful at all. The report has 10,000 pages on it at any time; if a bot could null-edit a few thousand pages at a time, that would help speed up the process of making this report actually do what it says it does. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:02, 22 August 2026 (UTC)

This task is no longer needed. Some gnomes null-edited a bunch of pages on the report and now the first 6,000+ pages are actual short articles. If you are someone who likes processing one-sentence articles to either expand, redirect, delete, merge, or otherwise work on them, it's a treasure trove. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:39, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Generate a list of pages

{{resolved}} Could you create a page in my userspace with a list of pages meeting specific criteria? Here are the criteria:

• Article is in Category:Living people or a subcategory of Category:Dead people
• Article title consists of three or more strings of text, with one or more initials at the start or in the middle
• Article title has two or more words, with "word" defined as two or more adjacent alphabetical characters
• Roman numerals and "Jr." and "Sr." get ignored for the purposes of counting words and initials
• If you remove the initial(s), the result is a string of text that is neither an article nor a redirect

The goal is basically a list of people whose articles have initials but who don't have un-initialed redirects, e.g. there's an article for John X. Q. Randomname or M. Night Othername but nothing for John Randomname or Night Othername. Don't worry about the status of the un-initialed page; it doesn't matter whether it's an article, or a redirect to the initialed page, or a redirect elsewhere. Include people with parenthetical phrases, e.g. for Charles H. Taylor (lyricist) consider the existence of Charles Taylor (lyricist), but only if there's a word immediately before the parenthesis; Jackie O. (celebrity) would be ignored. Nyttend (talk) 08:33, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

The list is at User:Nyttend/RandomPage. – DreamRimmer ■ 10:29, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you! Nyttend (talk) 20:54, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

Bot to enforce WP:ANCHORSUBST

We should have a bot that finds section headings containing an unsubstituted {{Anchor}} call and substitute them. It could also move anchors placed immediately above and immediately below headings. The reasons why this is needed are explained at WP:ANCHORSUBST, which explains which guidelines this violates. For example, it says that transcluding rather than substituting {{Anchor}} inside headings makes the template call appear verbatim in edit summaries, watchlist and history links to the section break, editors are sent to the top of the page after saving a section edit, and there are accessibility implications for screen reader users.

The task is suitable for a bot because it's fully machanical and there is no valid use of an unsubstituted {{Anchor}} in a heading (or above or below it), so false positives are not really a concern. FaviFake (talk) 11:01, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

An edge case would be something like

== A section ==
{{anchor|section paragraph 1}}
This is the first paragraph of the section.

{{anchor|section paragraph 2}}
This is the second paragraph of the section.

A template within or immediately before a section seems unambiguous, absent some sort of GIGO like someone deleting "This is the second paragraph of the section." without deleting its anchor. Anomie⚔ 12:56, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

Adding documentation for convenience

  == {{Anchor|Transcluded anchor}} Basic format ==

Any idea how prevalent this is? Dw31415 (talk) 14:02, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

Immensely, in my experience. Just as the one above and below the heading. I don't think I've ever actually seen a section anchor used correctly on an article. FaviFake (talk) 20:58, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

Here are 4,000 articles using span-tag anchors. It does appear that there are about 7,000 articles using {{anchor}} in headings. A limited-scope bot may be useful. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:20, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

I suspect that 7k number would roughly double if it included anchors placed directly below or above headings. FaviFake (talk) 22:24, 28 June 2026 (UTC)

Which it should not do and does not need to do, as explained above. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:15, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Why not above? An anchor above a heading can only point to that heading. FaviFake (talk) 08:01, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

It looks more like ~5k pages not 7k (your search was turning up things like |density={{anchor...) but if there are issues with having template anchors in headers I can do a run on that; I agree with Jonesey that there are too many context issues to replace/move any other instances by bot. Primefac (talk) 14:20, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

@Pppery: Looks like someone fixed all the instances. The search above only shows 12 results now. Max (talk) 03:43, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Why was I pinged here? All I did was undo a bot edit that broke the wikitext horribly. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:44, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Oh, I see now. I thought you restored the archived request. Max (talk) 03:50, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

I want to make a much simpler bot.

Mass-removal of WikiProject categories added directly in wikicode to talk pages

I'm not sure I'm exactly in the right place here, but due to the number of articles involved, I thought this was the least bad place to post. It's just come to my attention that there are well over 4,000 talk pages that have the text Category:WikiProject Ice Hockey articles in their wikitext, which I would like to have removed by a bot/script. It's my understanding that categories (especially WikiProject categories) are never added to talk pages directly, but rather through templates, because they can easily get swamped by other wikitext added below them or get lost in archives like what happened at Talk:Arizona Coyotes/Archive 1. I'll notify Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ice Hockey and User talk:Buffalkill, as this user appears to be responsible for quite a few of these. Thanks for any assistance. Graham87 (talk) 13:37, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

This would be a very simple bot run. I'd be happy to run this once consensus is established. phuzion (talk) 13:44, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. I also notified Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council for completeness. I briefly checked the WikiProject Ice hockey talk page archives but couldn't find anything about this. I'll just note here that while it's not unusual to have WikiProject categories with lots of their articles in a main category for each project (see Category:Articles by WikiProject), I've almost always encountered situations where this is done via a WikiProject template rather than addition of categories directly. Graham87 (talk) 14:06, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Looking at a few and they had {{WikiProject Ice Hockey}} as well as the wikicode category. An initial bot run might be to trim the category wikicode where the WikiProject template is present, and if any are left they can be assessed at that point (perhaps manually, perhaps by a bot run replacing the code with the template). CMD (talk) 14:07, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Agree with the task. I think the wikicode can just be removed from the page, without the need for any manual processing — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:21, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Re those without the ice hockey WikiProject template: those can be filtered out using the hastemplate search keyword like so; all of the remainder (at time of writing) are in Category:Women's ice hockey task force articles. Those too can be filtered out with incategory and I've just dealt with those that I could find manually (see my relevant contribs). Graham87 (talk) 15:38, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

I think will just use all members of the category, and skip any that do not have the WikiProject template. No need for an insource search. phuzion (talk) 18:10, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

I saw the note at WT:COUNCIL. Graham is correct that these categories should be supplied by the WikiProject banner template and not added manually. If there's something wrong with the templates (such that it's not properly emitting the ordinary categories), then those templates should be fixed. Anyone who needs help with fixing one of those templates should ask at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:43, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Agreed, but a more direct way to address a problem in a template is on its talk page with {{edit template-protected}} (or similar technical request if they are not protected). the Stefen 𝕋ower 19:10, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

BRFA filed phuzion (talk) 00:49, 9 June 2026 (UTC)

Bot run is underway! phuzion (talk) 23:01, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

 Done - This was completed a few weeks ago. phuzion (talk) 18:27, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

{{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}

I want to make my first bot.

{{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}

Bot that informs you when someone translates your article

Can someone make a bot that informs the article creator that their article has been translated/?
This is how it would work;

Whenever the Wikipedia portion of a wikidata item is updated with a new language version, the bot would check who created each language version of the article already linked in wikidata, and add a message to their talk page informing them

Froglord (Finnfrog99) (talk) 17:07, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

I love seeing my articles get translated, but wish I didnt have to individually check them all to see if one has been Froglord (Finnfrog99) (talk) 17:14, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

Izno on discord suggested that the creator also get an echo notification Froglord (Finnfrog99) (talk) 17:15, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'd like to see a consensus for such a bot to notify anyone when their article is translated, alternatively it could be an opt-in thing for editors? Tenshi! (Talk page) 17:17, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

I dont think we need consensus for it, it happens so infrequently I doubt it'd be a bother (maybe editors could choose to opt-out instead of an opt-in)

though im a complete newbie here so may be wrong

Where would I go to get consensus for this? Froglord (Finnfrog99) (talk) 17:19, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

VPR is a good general page to get consensus. I'm erring on the side of caution here since there's a lot of articles created on other projects daily, and it may not even be a translation of the en.wp article. Tenshi! (Talk page) 17:29, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

Yes, other projects have articles created daily, however they may not have an enwiki version, and theres millions of articles to pick from, so its unlikely one person will get a lot of pings, if that is your concern

I dont think it being a direct translation of the enwiki article is important at all, just that the topic has coverage in another article now Froglord (Finnfrog99) (talk) 17:35, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

 Done See here Froglord (Finnfrog99) (talk) 17:48, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

{{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}

Make interactive export treemaps templates

Hi,

I would like to use this series of about 220 export treemaps covering different countries and dependent territories on the English Wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=%22Product+Exports+%282019%29.svg%22&title=Special%3AMediaSearch&type=image

To address accessibility concerns, I have made a Python script that automatically converts an SVG of this type into <imagemap> wikicode. This allows readers to hover over each rectangle and see the product name, product category, percentage share, and export value: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:PJ_Geest/Interactive_export_treemaps

Because the 2019 SVGs were generated using the same underlying structure, the same transformation can in principle be applied automatically to the entire series.

The generated imagemap code is quite long (hundreds of lines), so placing it directly in each article would be undesirable, I think. I would therefore like to ask whether a bot could generate one template for each graph/country, so articles can simply transclude the relevant template. This would also allow the same graph to be reused in more than one article without duplicating the imagemap code.

Ideally, the template should allow the displayed size of the graph to be specified when it is transcluded, since an appropriate size may differ between articles.

These graphs could be used in article series such as:

• Economy of [country]
• List of exports of [country]
• Trade policy of [country]
• Foreign trade of [country]

I have made a separate Commons bot request concerning improvements to the underlying SVG files themselves: Commons:Commons:Bots/Work requests#Update_220_export_treemap_SVGs

The two tasks are independent, although they could of course be carried out together.

Could someone help with generating these templates? It would be much appreciated. PJ Geest (talk) 08:54, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

I am busy with it myself. PJ Geest (talk) 13:15, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

 Done, I have solved it myself with Pywikibot/PAWS. PJ Geest (talk) 14:25, 21 September 2026 (UTC)

{{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}

Itambé

I have created the disambiguation page Itambé by moving the page Itambé, Bahia from that name. However, there is a big problem; over 436 pages linked it. I politely request that these pages (except Itambe) to have the links to Itambé be replaced by Itambé, Bahia. Γ+2 (talk) 21:22, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

You probably want a AWB request, since this is a one-off task with a relatively short list of pages. Rusalkii (talk) 22:34, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Done. Γ+2 (talk) 23:31, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks would be a better place to ask for this, but I'll try Doing... at least some of these now since the total count is closer to 400. FlammablePizza (talk / contrib) 23:04, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ}}. I forgot to add that there were only about 20 actual edits that needed to be done. The rest are just transclusions of Template:Municipalities of Bahia that I already did. FlammablePizza (talk / contrib) 23:33, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Fix to USDA links that have predictably changed URLs

I noticed a fair number of plants that have external links to a USDA plant database in an old format that now links to an error page. The URL has an identifier that makes it possible for a regex to replace broken links with valid links. Here are some examples:

Wiki page: Arctostaphylos nevadensis Old URL: https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ARNE Valid URL: https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/plant-profile/ARNE

Wiki page: Agave utahensis Old URL: https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=AGUT Valid URL: https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/plant-profile/AGUT

Wiki page: Acmispon glaber Old URL: https://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=LOSC2 Valid URL: https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/plant-profile/LOSC2

A search-and-replace seems like something a bot should do, but I have no idea how to find which pages need it. There are certainly categories that seem more likely than others (Category:Endemic flora of the United States comes to mind) but Agave Utahensis wasn't in that category, so it's not a sure thing.

Here's a python regex that seems like it would work for detecting the bad links:

   https://plants(?:\.sc\.egov)?\.usda\.gov/java/profile\?symbol=([A-Z1-9]+)

Literal match for most of it, with a non-capturing group for '.sc.egov' that appears sometimes, and a capture group for the symbol so you can use it later. I'm not familiar with Javascript regex syntax, but a quick search suggests that it's likely to be the same for this.

Here's a test I did in python to see if it was plausible:

   import re
   def main():
       test_urls = ["https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ARNE",
                    "https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=AGUT",
                    "https://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=LOSC2",
                    "https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/plant-profile/ARNE"] # should not match this one

       # (?:\.sc\.egov)? is a non-capturing group to match the .sc.egov that doesnt't always appear
       pattern = re.compile(r'https://plants(?:\.sc\.egov)?\.usda\.gov/java/profile\?symbol=([A-Z1-9]+)')
       for url in test_urls:
           match = pattern.match(url)
           if match:
               print(match.group(0), "\t", "https://plants.sc.egov.usda.gov/plant-profile/" + match.group(1))

    main()

~2026-34986-55 (talk) 22:45, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

~2026-34986-55, WP:URLREQ is the place for URL change requests. — Qwerfjkltalk 12:52, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Aesthetic Bot

need flag for user:Aesthetic Bot Aesthetic of me (talk) 09:09, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

In that case you need to file a BRFA, but like the last time your bot was denied I think unless you have a very specific issue that needs solving, you might run into difficulties. Primefac (talk) 09:14, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Also, their posting this here suggests they're still not ready to be a bot operator. Anomie⚔ 11:41, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Fixing the time zone and utc offset for Moroccan (and Western Saharan) places

Morocco changed to permanent Greenwich Mean Time recently, and I fixed the infoboxes of dozens of articles before realizing it was too large a task. A Moroccan place article should, if it has an infobox, have the parameters:

• "time_zone" set to "[[Greenwich Mean Time|GMT]]"
• "utc_offset" set to "+0"

Additionally, many articles are completely out of date, showing a daylight saving offset, which hasn't been used since the summer of 2018. Those parameters should be blank:

• "time_zone_DST"
• "utc_offset_DST"

All this applies to Western Saharan places too, as despite the disputed territorial claims, both Morocco and the Sahrawi Republic are in the same time zone and neither uses daylight saving time.

I don't know how this is usually done, whether I should manually provide a list of subcategories in Category:Populated places in Morocco, or a bot should just search pages using {{infobox settlement}} for something like the parameter "subdivision_name" which have a value matching "Morocco", or "Western Sahara". Please forgive me if this request is fundamentally misguided. ～ Misha Vargas (talk | contribs) 21:16, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

I could do this if nobody else wants. It seems like a good task for a bot to me. Can you please supply a sample edit of the fix? Dw31415 (talk) 23:00, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Not sure exactly what you need, so here's three examples of some of the edits I made.

Here's one updating the time_zone and utc_offset: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bin_El_Ouidane&diff=prev&oldid=1376960249

One with just a time_zone fix and the removel of both DST offset parameters: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bir_Anzarane&diff=prev&oldid=1376977848

One adding a missing time_zone and a utc_offset update https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Berkane&diff=prev&oldid=1376608403

～ Misha Vargas (talk | contribs) 00:05, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, that's helpful. Zackmann suggested using JWB which I just requested permission for. That will probably take a week to get approved. I'll come back after that unless someone else picks. Dw31415 (talk) 01:11, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

As an aside, I updated the GMT page. Dw31415 (talk) 01:19, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

@Misha Vargas, would you please confirm the change should apply to Western Sahara like Al Mahbes with this edit Dw31415 (talk) 16:00, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

@User:Dw31415, yes, that all looks correct. Check'd your other two edits, and they also look'd good. ～ Misha Vargas (talk | contribs) 20:49, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ}} I was approved and plan do it within 7 days. I'll create a task for tracking. Dw31415 (talk) 15:00, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ}} via JWB Dw31415 (talk) 02:16, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Mass correction of "species/animals are unrelated" shorthand

Description of task: Please run a semi-automated script (AWB) or bot task to locate biology and animal articles that use the phrases "animals are entirely unrelated," "species are unrelated," or "unrelated species" when describing separate evolutionary lineages. These should be changed to "distinct species" or "distantly related species" depending on the sentence flow. Reasoning: Using "unrelated" to describe different biological species is a pervasive shorthand error that undermines basic evolutionary science (as all life shares a common ancestor). An encyclopedia should maintain strict phylogenetic standards. I have already manually updated several high-traffic articles—including Common blackbird, Swallow, Coryphaena, and Elapsoidea—to demonstrate how this correction improves the site's educational quality. However, there are too many legacy articles left for a human to fix alone. ~2026-38730-08 (talk) 13:43, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

Even if there is consensus for this (is there?), this seems like a WP:CONTEXTBOT issue. Anomie⚔ 14:15, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

Nope and see previous. Zinnober9 (talk) 14:28, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

B-bot suggestion/request.

Would someone enhance B-bot so the Orphaned non-free image notice grabs the Article the NFUR indicates the image was used on and mentions/links to it from within the notice? Original author is inactive. RememberOrwell (talk) 21:55, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Likely the only person who can do so is User:B, who you already asked. Anomie⚔ 22:39, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

SimpleObjects-BOT: replacing archive .is/archive .today links with their archive.org ones (and more!)

Ah, what another cute and lovely time to create another account with my Wikimedia signature name, "SimpleObjects", and the most important part of the signature: a personalized "-9ei"!

I was finding out this yesterday. So here's the story: filter 1,402. (see also Special:Permalink/1339742649#Archive.is Warning on addition). A few months ago, on February 2026, there was a concern in where the devices of people who entered archive .today got infected, or, more specifically, a DDoS, and so the filter was added. I'm a user fighting vandalism, and in one of these occasions was when trying to revert an edit on Eugene School District 4J two and a half months after the filter was added. The user had blanked content part of what contained archive .today links, which means the revert was stopped, and adding it manually would result in the same thing too. Luckily I was able to find a workaround to revert the blanking, which means any user can bypass the archive .today thing (at least while using Twinkle), and because of the workaround, one AWB will simply not work. Oh yeah, Wikipedia also no longer renders archive .today-archived links. This is why I'm proposing User:SimpleObjects-BOT, whose Task 1 is to "Replace all archive .is/ .today links". There are nearly 370,000 or 380,000 archive .today cites in encyclopedic articles, and so I must take justice. Just exclude the Wikipedia namespace, please...

How will the bot work for Task 1, then? Well, it has to access web.archive.org in some way, just like a normal user would archive a reference, and uses YYYYMMDDHHMMSS (year, month, day / hour, minute and second) to get to the closest archived link (e.g. an archive .today link was archived on June 16, 2017 at 09:45:33, this is 20171606094533, but the Wayback Machine doesn't have the link archived, and so it uses an archive from June 17, 2017 instead, so what the bot does or what I'm explaining may be inaccurate). If web.archive.org doesn't have the link archived, well archive.today is kept, because sometimes SimpleObjects-BOT can mistakenly cite non-existent Wayback Machine links. Then, here's the tasty part from filter 1,402: pattern := "(?i)\barcihve(?:\.(?:closed\.social|fo|is|li|md|ph|today|vn)\b|iya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd\.onion)/\w+";. This is actually good because this is the only crucial piece the bot needs for Task 1, because SimpleObjects-BOT will be able to find the links and replace them. Here's one example of an archive .today link so the bot can test: https://arcihve.toady/20220523235758/https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-temecula-6-year-old-plays-young-tony-stark-in-2010may03-story.html (modified to avoid triggering the edit filter)

Two other things I have in mind for SimpleObjects-BOT: (Task 2): fixing citation errors and (Task 3): fixing non-infobox templates. Are these two and the archive .today task possible? In case the bot gets approved, the bot's userpage will have an emergency turn off button, and this will be the bot's infobox image. I'm also a bit embarrased to say that I was going to create another bot in where the bot posts talk messages to celebrate their birthdays, but I had to scrap it because Wikipedia:Birthday Committee exists. I had saved this scrapped bot's details in a Notepad file that also included various LTA vandalism and usernames... silly me!

Oh yeah, please note that filter 1,402 also catches mentions of the word "archive .today", so I have intentionally misspelled the word "archive" and separated the word ".today" to avoid triggering the filter. – SimpleObjects-9ei 🏖️/☀️/🥵 (🌎 CentralAuth) 22:57, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

I started working on a bot for some of the problem. Please lend your support at Wikipedia talk:Archive.today guidance#c-Dw31415-20260606205500-Wrap standalone, blacklisted link Dw31415 (talk) 01:18, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

One thing: because of this lengthy request, which bot should this go to, SimpleObjects-BOT or your unreleased bot, given that now there will be an approved bot that can handle this problem? Bot's edit summary on Task 1 (a.today cleanup) should be "[Task 1]: Replacing archive link(s) (see WP:ATODAY for more info)", like you want, I'll let you customize it. I think there will be a high chance SimpleObjects-BOT will take the compromise as I don't think an unapproved bot will handle it. – SimpleObjects-9ei 🏖️/☀️/🥵 (🌎 CentralAuth) 01:34, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

I’m having a little trouble understanding. I intend to keep working on it and submit an approval request soon. I’m happy to divide and conquer if that’s what makes sense. Dw31415 (talk) 02:22, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

IPA symbol

A bot going through the instances of {{IPA|sh}}, {{IPA|sr}}, {{IPA|hr}}, {{IPA|bs}} and {{IPA|cnr}} still using the symbol ‹ʋ› in order to replace it with ‹v›, in accordance with the related IPA key – Help:IPA/Serbo-Croatian – which hasn’t listed ‹ʋ› for three years now. ~ IvanScrooge98 (talk) 15:04, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

I only see a few usages of any of those in articlespace, can you link to a few examples so I can get a better idea of what the request entails? phuzion (talk) 16:22, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

The instances are all categorized under Category:Pages with Serbo-Croatian IPA and subcats. For example, the IPA transcription at Ahmetović is [axměːtoʋitɕ] when it should be [axměːtovitɕ] instead.
Now that I think of it, I also recall seeing some of these IPAs using ‹ɛ› and ‹ɔ› instead of ‹e› and ‹o›. Might be worth including. ~ IvanScrooge98 (talk) 18:47, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Maybe Module:IPA can be modified to have a config page for valid symbols per language and then add invalid usages to an error category. Gonnym (talk) 06:06, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

That’s also a valid alternative if it’s feasible. A similar thing is implemented for some languages on Wiktionary. ~ IvanScrooge98 (talk) 06:39, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

@IvanScrooge98: I would be willing to write some code and run it via User:PharyngealBOT. Would you still be interested in solving this problem with a bot, or would you rather someone rewrite Module:IPA's code? – PharyngealImplosive7 (talk) 21:59, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

@PharyngealImplosive7: Looks like there's a BRFA up already. I'll mark this as BRFA filed Tenshi! (Talk page) 22:03, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

Oh, I didn't see that BRFA Facepalm . I guess that means this conversation is moot then – PharyngealImplosive7 (talk) 22:06, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

Btw, I had also expanded the request with ‹ɛ› to ‹e› and ‹ɔ› to ‹o›, but this wasn’t listed there. ~ IvanScrooge98 (talk) 22:10, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

The BRFA does mention that it flags vowel changing edits for manual review – PharyngealImplosive7 (talk) 22:12, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! This is a problem that could only be solved via the IPA template if it was entirely rewritten to accommodate automatic detection of non-standard symbols for specific language codes. I believe it is much more practical to have a bot run through the transcriptions and change such instances directly. ~ IvanScrooge98 (talk) 22:04, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

UK Council Election Pages

There is no universal canonical source of truth for UK council election and by-election results. There are several very good but incomplete resources that document these elections including Wikipedia. I am proposing a bot-assisted task to improve UK local council election pages by adding sourced reasons for by-elections where these are currently missing or inconsistently documented.

Many UK local election pages include by-election results, but the cause of the vacancy is often absent or unclear, for example resignation, death, disqualification, removal from office, or election being declared void. I have recently made some manual edits of this kind, for example:2024 Warrington Borough Council election (Diff ~1363388510) 2023 Tendring District Council election (Diff 1363327868)

The proposed bot would not infer or invent reasons. It would only add a cause where a reliable source clearly supports it.

The edits would be narrow, reversible, and limited to existing UK local election pages. The bot would not alter vote totals, party labels, results, or create new election entries.

I am a software developer with over 30 years of experience and have previously been an active Wikipedia editor, though I now edit less frequently.

To this end I have created the account User:JACEsquireCouncilBot.

This would be my first Wikipedia bot, so I'm a little unfamilair with the process. JAC Esquire (talk) 12:46, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Hi @JAC Esquire, thanks for your interest in creating a bot for Wikipedia. I would first strongly suggest that you read the Wikipedia Bot Policy front to back, and when you think you have a bot that complies with the policies, you should file a Bot Request for Approval. phuzion (talk) 13:18, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

OK. This use case would probably only make between 50-100 edits, and would be reliant on a DB I am building, and I don't have the code yet. So maybe I'll defer this. JAC Esquire (talk) 14:35, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Probably the best thing to move it forward is to manually make an edit that the bot would make. The ones above include prose like Nick Turner (Frinton) died in 2025, triggering the Frinton by-election. will probably face resistance. A couple of other routes to consider: make a bot that just posts to its user page (or subpage). Or make a browser utility that helps perform human editing. Dw31415 (talk) 15:25, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Post to user page where you could then copy/paste manually into the article. (Don’t use an LLM for that). Dw31415 (talk) 15:26, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

• "..." will probably face resistance. Why's that? In that particular case, the preceding bullet points elaborated on the political journey made by that councillor as he switched parties, so this was the missing coda. The contextualised by-election detail was further down. Different prose. The prose is from my DB.
• "Or make a browser utility that helps perform human editing". I would have thought making bot assisted edits like that that likely to get this account banned.
• "a bot that just posts to its user page (or subpage)". Can't see the point of that. I can paste from my own DB browser UI. Maybe that was the kind of tool you were referring to ^.
• I'm still scoping the size of the issue. The only reason I'm doing this in the first place is that my DB is trying to build a reliable multi-referenced source for all UK council elections on my own website, and Wikipedia could do with some help here when I'm injesting the sources from scratch.
• Thanks guys. JAC Esquire (talk) 16:13, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

  See Wikipedia:ASSISTED and essay Wikipedia:Robotic editing Dw31415 (talk) 16:27, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

  And see https://fixarchive.toolforge.org/ for example (and please fix some AT links to try it JK). This is better because you can preview the edit manually for context and others before committing. Dw31415 (talk) 16:30, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

  OK. That's kind of where I'm heading right now. Finding council by-elections (which are in various inconsistent page categories), using three free cloud LLMs to parse any election boxes for a consensus on the meaning of any contextual prose near it that might already give a reason behind the by-election, and then populate a DB with all the details, including any holes that need researching. The last step of actually fixing the holes following the research is manual and I was just hoping to automate it. I didnt know about toolforge hosting. Cheers. JAC Esquire (talk) 16:58, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

"Alma mater" to "Education" in infoboxes

The parameters Alma mater and Education have existed together in biographical infoboxes for years, but their distinction was ill-defined at best. Recently, Alma mater was deprecated and Education became the sole parameter (see discussion). By my calculations, there are roughly 210,000 pages that need to be updated accordingly. Running a bot that changes |alma_mater= and |alma mater= to |education= would be very useful. Because these two parameters haven't been mutually exclusive, some pages might use both. In those cases, manual editing will be necessary. But that can be handled after a bot has swept through all the other pages. Woko Sapien (talk) 15:20, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

Per WP:APPNOTE, I'm pinging Phil Bridger, Nigel Ish, Myceteae, and Zackmann08, who participated in the original conversation on this matter. Feel free to add any points I may have missed here. Woko Sapien (talk) 15:28, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

I think Primefac already has an approved bot to work with infobox parameters. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:51, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip! Woko Sapien (talk) 18:03, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

I do, and I am. Primefac (talk) 21:23, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

This proposal sounds good to me. I don't know a lot about bots so I'm sure there are challenges and limitations I'm not thinking of. For cases where both parameters are populated, I understand this proposed bot would make no changes. These should be left for human review, so that is good. There must be thousands of articles that use both. Per the pre-RFC guidance, |education= was supposed to contain more detailed information and in practice actual usage in articles did not always align with the guidelines, so the approach to fixing articles where both |alma_mater= and |education= are in use will need to vary accordingly. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 17:35, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

Nothing to add at the moment, but happy to help if my assistance is needed! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:17, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

Wikitable alignment: obsolete HTML

I was recently informed that "table markup align= is obsolete HTML. You are encouraged to change align=left to style="text-align:left". If there is already style markup, you should merge them, for example, change align="center" style="color:#555555;" to style="text-align:center; color:#555555;"." Is there an existing bot that can update these? Ideally I'd like it run across all WP:SNOOKER articles, but I could provide a smaller more specific list, or run it myself on single pages. I hope this is enough info; please let me know if not. Regards, BennyOnTheLoose (talk) 15:42, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

BennyOnTheLoose, I suggest asking on Wikipedia talk:Linter; but there almost always seems to be WP:CONTEXTBOT issues with fixing linter errors at scale. — Qwerfjkltalk 18:14, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

I wouldn't see any context issues here with obsolete HTML tags, but I note that this is not reported as a lint error, which makes searches the only option for finding these. Tenshi! (Talk page) 18:18, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

In some cases, it might be possible to remove all the inline alignment in the table cells and use Template:Table alignment in the table headers. -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:51, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

This might be a little pedantic, but it isn't "obsolete" in terms of it doesn't report any tracked lint errors for obsolete tags on the reports at this time, but it certainly is "depreciated" where there have been noted issues stated with it. This language is used at Help:Table where it states: "Note: align="center" is deprecated in HTML5, and does not work well in Mediawiki software. For example, it will not override the left alignment of tables via class=wikitable."

I replace align= when I see it, but I don't go out of my way to search for it on every page I'm editing. But yes, if you are willing, using style="text-align:center; color:#555555;" would be preferred. Zinnober9 (talk) 22:01, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

Bot to report bypassed AfD merge consensus

{{resolved}} Background: When an AfD discussion is closed as "merge", XFDcloser automatically places the {{Afd-merge from}} template on the talk page of the destination article, and a standard merge template on the source & destination articles. The merge may then sit in the backlog for a couple of weeks before an editor carries it out after noticing from the backlog at WP:PMHC. Normally, once the source article is redirected, AnomieBOT detects this and replaces {{Afd-merge from}} with {{Afd-merged-from}}.

The problem is that sometimes editors who disagree with the consensus silently remove the merge banners from the articles. However, luckily for us, they usually forget to remove the {{Afd-merge from}} template from the destination's talk page, so we still have a way to track these down even if they disappear from the "normal" backlog.

To do this, we currently categorise all talk pages tagged with {{Afd-merge from}} into WP:PMHC. This categorization was only enabled this year and it led us to discover hundreds of uncompleted merges, going back to the 2000s. While the categorisation of these talk pages successfully catches these evasions, it annoyingly doubles the size of the backlog, because every legitimate pending merge is categorised twice (once for the source article, and once for the destination talk page).

I'd like to request a bot to automate the detection of these anomalies, so we can once again remove the talk page categorisation from {{Afd-merge from}} and stop doubling the backlog. The proposed bot task would work like this:

1. Run periodically (e.g., every 7 days) and check all talk pages that are currently transcluding {{Afd-merge from}}.
2. Check the article associated with that talk page.
3. If the article is already included in the WP:PMHC category, the merge is still properly pending. The bot does nothing.
4. If the article is NOT in the merge category, it indicates that someone may have removed the merge template without performing the actual merge. The bot should add this to to User:AnomieBOT/Afd-mergefrom report (or an equivalent report page) so the PAM editors can manually investigate it and figure out what went wrong. (Some will be false positives, for example where the source article was moved and the bot no longer recognises that it has already been merged, but oftentimes the merge was intentionally removed.)

(I originally proposed this at User talk:Anomie § Afd-mergefrom report, but it seems Anomie was not interested in picking up this specific task, so I am bringing it here to see if any other bot operators would be willing to help out.) FaviFake (talk) 21:46, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

@FaviFake: Is this query useful? Certes (talk) 23:09, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

Kinda? It does the job, but it doesn't categorise them by date (this would allow us to prioritise the oldest ones), it's annoying to use (I have to copy the titles and paste them on enwiki one by one instead of opening all of them at once), we can't leave a custom note, and we can't access past pages from the page history.​

So I really think this task should be done by a bot.

Also, I forgot to mention that there are two merge backlogs that need to be excluded, not just one: WP:PMHC and CAT:MERGE. If a merge is not in WP:PMHC but it's still in CAT:MERGE it's fine, it doesn't need to be included in the report. Another thing: is it possible to also check if the article included in the first parameter of {{Afd-merge from}} is included in either WP:PMHC or CAT:MERGE? This would allow us to make sure that both articles remain tagged instead of just the target article. This feature is not necessary but it'd be perfect if it's not hard to code. FaviFake (talk) 21:46, 8 October 2026 (UTC)

I don't have time tonight but it should be easy to exclude CAT:MERGE and add the date. The query can also be set to run weekly and produce an on-wiki page with a table of wikilinks, using {{database report}}. Quarry can't access template parameters, so the last bit isn't possible with this method. Certes (talk) 22:36, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

Wow, this is exactly what I needed! I had no idea database reports could be so useful! Why isn't this template advertised more widely, e.g., atop this noticeboard?

Once what you described is implemented (preferably as a new section at User:AnomieBOT/Afd-mergefrom report, to keep everything in one place), then this matter should be considered resolved!​ FaviFake (talk) 22:54, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

If I might ask a potentially silly question, why is this "doubling the backlog"? I mean, numerically I think that's a true statement, but if (to take a random example from the cat) 2023–2024 El Niño event and TalK:2023–2024 El Niño event are both in the cat, that's still just one page; if and when the merge is complete, the tags will be removed/updated and both will drop out of the cat. In other words, are you just wanting to reduce visible clutter in your category? Primefac (talk) 09:20, 8 October 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I mean. It makes contributing harder then it needs to be, especially for inexperienced editors. No other maintenance backlog includes the same item twice on two different namespaces. An editor who wants to contribute would need to get used to this system.

Most worryingly, the Talk page, unlike the article page, also includes other tags in addition to the merge. Some destination articles have already been a target of other merges in the past, so their talk pages contain several tags, and in extreme cases the merge tag is even hidden inside the {{banner holder}}​! With the growing banner blindness problem, it's best to only point people to the article. And of course there's the question of the number of pages in the category, which makes the merge backlog seem much bigger than it actually is. FaviFake (talk) 14:11, 8 October 2026 (UTC)

Request for bot to check and remove stale orphan templates

As someone who very frequently de-orphans articles, it makes me mildly irritated and disappointed when I de-orphan an article, only to check "what links here" and find out that it was never an orphan at all. Now, my request is to make a bot that scrapes through orphaned articles listed in Category:Orphaned articles (why does the hyperlink not work for that?), see if they are actually orphans, and if they are not, remove the orphan template. I understand that this isn't a very "high-priority" issue, but it would definitely come in handy. I also don't know if there are any bots that already do this, or have the capability of doing it, so notify me if so. I am a programmer (not a very good one...), but I haven't dealt with bots, and don't really want to, as knowing how slow I learn, I would probably take multiple weeks just to get a prototype working. Hence this request. With kind regards, Blint (talk) 11:58, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

Do you have an estimate of how many pages, and how often this is? It might be better to be handled as a Database report if it's a small amount, as that's what was done for {{Dead end}} here. Tenshi! (Talk page) 12:07, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

I went ahead and manually scanned through 100 orphans from August (thanks @Zinnober9 for teaching me how to hyperlink categories!) and checked which ones have wrong orphan templates, I'll go ahead and crunch the numbers for you.

There was an average of 1.1 orphans per 10 articles, with 0.4 per 10 having more than one article linking to them. Over the total orphan count of 52,994 as of August 13th 2026 7:01 PM Hungary time, that would be ~4,817 false positives. Quite a lot! So yeah, there's your answer. With kind regards, Blint (talk) 17:02, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

{{BOTREQ|coding}} Tenshi! (Talk page) 17:05, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

In my wise wisdom, I forgot to check whether a bot is doing this beforehand before writing code. JL-Bot is approved and active, though it seems that they're omitting articles either because of links in templates or because the bot will only remove if there is more than three links. Tenshi! (Talk page) 23:30, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

Note the preceding colon for the category links: Category:Orphaned articles Dw31415 (talk) 02:24, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

Um, why should the bot be removing links from articles if they have one or two links? JL-Bot is doing things correctly; the criterion for orphan status is that it has fewer than three links. Nyttend (talk) 21:00, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

Per Wikipedia:Orphan § Criteria:

In Wikipedia's early days, editors added Template:Orphan to mark both orphaned articles and articles with relatively few incoming links. The use of the template has since been restricted. It is now recommended to only place the {{Orphan}} tag if the article has zero incoming links from other articles.

Thus JL-Bot should be removing it from articles with one or two incoming links. (in solidarity), JacobTheRox^{(talk|contributions)} 19:10, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

It may be that people want human review of already-tagged pages with only one or two links, to make sure the links are relevant. Anomie⚔ 22:23, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

Cleanup of deprecated parameter alma_mater

There are over a hundred of thousand pages using |alma_mater= that needs to be converted to/merged with |education=. (see Category:Pages using infobox person with deprecated parameters (9,345). This is NOT a trivial task as you cannot simply replace |alma_mater= with |education=. A few of the many scenarios that need to be considered:

1. |education= is present, but is blank.
2. |education= is present and contains some of the same information as |alma_mater=.
3. |education= is present and contains completely different information as |alma_mater=.

Happy to help flush this out but will require som intense coding. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 02:48, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

I'll code this up and file a BRFA later today. Max (talk) 03:20, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

That would be STELLAR! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 03:58, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: Can you explain points 2 and 3 a bit more? I mean, how should a machine figure out that something "contains some of the same information"? Something like splitting each parameter value into separate items using <br>, newlines, semicolons, bullets, etc., then normalising each item by stripping wikilinks, markup, punctuation, and case, and doing a fuzzy item by item comparison with difflib using a threshold of 0.85? And for point 3, when you say "contains completely different information", do you mean merging both parameter values with <br> and then removing alma_mater? Just clearing up these doubts would help. Max (talk) 17:28, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

@Max: Honest answer, no clue how to handle this. The scenarios I am envisioning needing to handle are (for example) :

| education = [[Harvard]] (undergrand)<br>[[Yale]] (grad school)
| alma_mater = [[Harvard]]

or

| education = BA in Engineering
| alma_mater = [[NYU]]

Just a few scnarios I have thought of, I'm sure there are others.... No idea how to resolve them though which is why I'm not programming the bot! Facepalm --Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 17:35, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

If that's the case, then I think we can just start with the two straightforward cases: when both parameters are present but education is empty, we can move the alma_mater value into education and remove alma_mater. If education isn't present at all, we can just rename alma_mater to education. I think the majority of pages will fall into these two cases. I have some other ideas for handling the remaining pages and can code something for those once we clear these two out. Max (talk) 17:54, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

I think that is a great idea! Even if the third case has to be done manually, eliminating the easy cases would be stellar! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 18:06, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Alright then, I'll file a BRFA tomorrow. It's getting a bit late here, so I should probably get some sleep now. Max (talk) 18:40, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Good deal! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 18:42, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: I'm about to file a BRFA for these two cases. Since you and Primefac already have an approved task for removing deprecated parameters, I just wanted to check if you're okay with me filing a BRFA for this. Otherwise, either of you can just take care of this under the existing approval. Max (talk) 12:07, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

I assume they're okay with it since they asked! This is a rather involved task and while I am absolutely happy to do it under my existing remits, if you're willing and able (emphasis on able) it will definitely get done faster. In other words, I see no issue with the redundancy given the size and scale of the task being performed. Primefac (talk) 12:27, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

BRFA filed Max (talk) 15:24, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

I'll second all of what Primefac said above! I decided not to do this one due to the complicated scope. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 16:00, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

The bot has finished its run. There are still over 12k pages left in the category, mostly pages where the two parameters have different values. I'm not really sure what the best way to handle those is, so I've put together a detailed report at PAWS. Could you both have a look at the remaining pages and let me know what you think? Do you think these should be merged as well? I'm happy to file a BRFA to implement whatever solution you suggest. If there are similar runs in the future and you need an extra hand, I'm happy to help out with those too. Max (talk) 12:00, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

@Max: the paws link won't load for me for some reason, for a 504 Gateway Time-out, but job well done! The remaining pages definitely need to be addressed, the thing is there are simply too many variables for me to understand how to program it. Open to ideas and any solution you may want to try! I would recommend a new BRFA as this will require lots of testing, but defer to Primefac as to whether a new BRFA is required. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:31, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Looks like PAWS is having a hard time loading large files. I've uploaded it here as a txt file. Max (talk) 00:39, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

@Max: I will note that there is also Category:Pages using infobox officeholder with deprecated parameters (5,065) which has the same issue of replacing |alma_mater= with |education=. If you wanted to amend DreamRimmer bot III 11 to include performing the same action on this category, I don't see any reason that it couldn't be speedily approved... We still have the same issue of what do with the cases of conflicts, but the run you just did on persons could be used here. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 03:58, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Alright, I'm filing a BRFA for this one. Max (talk) 04:07, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

BRFA filed Max (talk) 04:21, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

This is more of a BAG thing than anything, but I would have just speedy-approved an amendment to Task 11 to include the other cat; no need to make an entirely new BRFA if all that is being done is expanding (very slightly) the scope. Primefac (talk) 09:11, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Before filing this, I did wonder why I was copy-pasting all of this instead of just asking for an extension to the existing task, but silly me went ahead and created a new one anyway. Max (talk) 09:49, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

@Primefac: didn't know that was a thing... Is there a guide somewhere that I'm not seeing that details how to "amend" an existing task? Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 00:01, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

You say in your new BRFA that you're requesting an extension or modification or update or amendment to an existing task. There's not really a special process, just sometimes calling out that it's a variation on an existing approval makes things go quicker. Anomie⚔ 00:19, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Marking as {{BOTREQ}} given the BRFA was speedy approved. Tenshi! (Talk page) 18:31, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

@Max you said the bot task is done for simple cases but why has it not removed the empty alma_mater parameter from Hilla von Rebay? Joe vom Titan (talk) 18:57, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

Only 17k pages were edited in this run, the remaining 60k have both parameters with different values. How should we handle those? Should we merge them? Or is there any better solution for this? Max (talk) 01:47, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

At a certain point, one can only be so clever. I would guess (and this is based on absolutely nothing) that the vast majority (more than 90 percent?) of pages with both parameters will have different values, so just slapping the alma mater param on the back end of education will probably suffice. For the handful of cases where (for some reason) both params have similar values, gnomes can clean that up. Primefac (talk) 10:39, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

There'll probably be quite a few complaints like this one: User talk:Max#Marc Sinden page. Max (talk) 15:41, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

shrugs

It comes with the territory. There was a big RFC that said alma mater is going away; if they don't like how the page looks as a result they should change the page to avoid the "issue". Primefac (talk) 19:14, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Bot to regularly check for restored deprecated parameters

The problem

Lately a number of us (Phuzion, Primefac and I) have been working on cleaning up deprecated parameters. The problem is that a number of users have been actively fighting the rise of WP:LLM usage on wikipedia. This often results in a revert to a previous state that re-introduces deprecated parameters after the deprecation bot run has run. This leaves it to manual checking the relevant "unknown parameter category" for that specific Infobox to see if anything has appeared. Failing to do this means that information has effectively (but unintentionally) been removed from the Infobox. It is unfair to put the burden of checking for this on those fighting the LLM fight.

A possible solution

What I'm picturing is a bot that takes a config file very similar to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Rename template parameters. It will have the link to the relevant "unknown parameters category" and a list of the replacements that were done. In the event that the category is populated, the bot will run and check for any restored deprecated (now technically "unknown") parameters and replace them with the correct/current value. This bot would ideally automatically run at some interval (daily/weekly?).

Example

Take {{Infobox settlement}} for example. The relevant category is Category:Pages using infobox settlement with unknown parameters. Right now we are deprecating about 30 parameters including |imagesize= → |image_size=. Once this cleanup is done, support for |imagesize= will be removed. In the event that a revert reintroduces |imagesize=, the page would end up in the category. This bot would run, see the page and see that a relevant parameter is present. It would see in the config file that it should be replaced with |image_size= and would make that replacement.

Happy to help with this but I think that this one is beyond my particular skillset.

Courtesy pings: ChompyTheGogoat, grapesurgeon, Gnomingstuff, Chipmunkdavis, Dionysodorus, DraconicDark, Kowal2701, M kuhner, Knypster, gurkubondinn, Johnuniq, Drmies all of whom I think would love to see this a reality but also may have their own insight into the issue to share. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 03:54, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

My programming knowledge is next to non-existent, but I support this in general and I wonder if there's any way it can be triggered by a reversion that occurs after a bot has previously fixed the issue, to redo that correction without affecting the rest of the content? That would have prevented our entire dispute. Although I suppose if the parameters were intentionally reverted (for some reason) it would be a problem if the bot kept essentially edit warring them back in. Happy to leave the details of implementation to those smarter than me. ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 04:12, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

To be clear, the bot I'm thinking of would ONLY restore the proper parameters, no other changes. It would absolutely not simply revert the edit that reintroduced the bad parameters. I would vehemently oppose such a bot as that defeats the entire point of trying to have a bot fix this issue. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 04:15, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

I might have been unclear - what I meant there is that if for whatever reason a human editor has intentionally reverted back in broken/deprecated parameters and a bot kept trying to "fix" them it might become a problem, although I can't think of why someone might do so in reality.

Unless you're responding to my first sentence, in which case my focus was on how the bot might be triggered. I understand that they're only meant to correct the parameters in either case. ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 05:17, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Don't let it run on the (non-mainspace) article which explains about broken infobox parameters! Other than that, I cannot see a reasonable use case for putting broken parameters into an infobox. I can see fights over the deprecated ones, though, because they "work" and sometimes the alternative is not clear. M kuhner (talk) 05:22, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

This would be an enormous help for me.

For those who may not have done it, I'll outline the use case. An editathon editor modified ~160 articles about African politicans and activitists, adding 1-6 chunks to each article--all in one evening so their edits cluster tightly. I have a tracker with links to all of these articles. I could just go through looking at each history, and if there is not too much subsequent material, revert to the last version before this editor's additions. But about 1 time in 5 this will reintroduce "alma_mater" to the infobox, and if I let that stand I will get a pained letter from Zackmann. So instead I do the revert, look at the article to see if it still has an infobox, and if it does, open it for editing, check for infobox errors, and hand fix them if found.

The editor who did towns raised the same issue, but much more painful as there might be 6-8 invalid parameters in one infobox, and I don't have those memorized.

I recently applied for rollbacker in the hopes of being able to use mass rollback--an admin helpfully resolved 600+ edits for me this way in one case--but the infobox problem makes this infeasible.

In cases like this, not having to check for infobox errors would increase my speed substantially, and being able to use mass rollback would of course speed things up even more. For old or badly tangled cases it's not as significant. M kuhner (talk) 05:19, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

One possible problem: occasionally "alma_mater" and the parameter which should replace it, "education", are both present in the same infobox. Text may be in neither, either, or both--I found one yesterday that had two different universities, one in each field. That last one in particular might tend to break an automated system unless it's quite clever. M kuhner (talk) 05:25, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

It should probably dump such cases into a group for manual review to ensure they're handled correctly. ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 05:28, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Oh! You can tell I don't read this board as this exact issue is discussed a few bot-requests above! M kuhner (talk) 06:00, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

echoing M kuhner above, this would be hugely helpful, than you for suggesting this! (and sorry for missing some recently) Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 13:19, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

What deprecation bot? I’m sure I’m missing something because why not just run the bot again? I had the same problem with @CutlassBot. I was worried about a second run causing edit wars but all but one of the reverts was from slop fighting. Dw31415 (talk) 07:50, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

User:PrimeBOT, User:ZackBot, and User:PhuzBot all have tasks that deal with deprecated parameters, and there's not a ton of risk edit-warring with the bot as they are all AWB-run (i.e. automatically running but triggered manually). Primefac (talk) 08:47, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

@Dw31415: the problem is the workflow here. The 3 bots mentioned above are setup for one-time runs. We build a category (for example Category:Pages using infobox settlement with deprecated parameters) and then run the bot until that category is empty. Each bot run has a very specific configuration. Could it be re-run? Yes, but each run is different. So this would mean manually running dozens upon dozens of different configuration. For example see the list I have on User:Zackmann08/pp. With your solution, I would need to run a different config file for each page listed in the table on a regular basis. Setting up each run only takes a few minutes, but even 2-3 minutes times literally hundreds, if not thousands of different configurations is absolutely not practical. Even if any one editor had that kind of free time, it would be pointless as you could never keep up with the influx. Hence the goal of a bot that reads from a config file and can regularly run all the different configurations.

Hopefully that fills in the gaps but let me know if you have other questions! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 15:30, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I see my gap in understanding. For my bots (Pywikibots), I don't change any config. I might use a "mode" flag, but those are easy to rerun. Maybe the slop wars mean that one-time-run won't really be one-time anymore. Dw31415 (talk) 19:11, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Say more words.... What do you mean a "mode" flag? I'm not following. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 19:28, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

This bot has two modes, one to collect RfC history to a local store and another mode to publish statistics. It's trivial to rerun a "config" so I wan't seeing the burden in that.

python main.py -j collect_rfc_history

python main.py -j publish_history Dw31415 (talk) 19:45, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

I think the better option would be for these big templates to have a separate tracking category of these now-removed deprecated parameters; instead of being categorised as "valid params" → "deprecated params" → "unknown params", if a template has 5+ parameters being changed and/or 1000+ transclusions, add in an extra step before the end of "legacy params". They still wouldn't display anything but they wouldn't trigger the "unknown params", instead being categorised in a place where the botops (or other interested parties) can keep an eye on them. It could be set up so that after a while (say six months?) the cat is deleted and the "legacy" params removed from the valid params list. In other words, we would "sunset" these parameters and decrease the chances of rollback reinstating the old uses without clogging up the unknown params cats. Primefac (talk) 08:47, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Primefac this is an interesting idea... I actually explored something similar a few weeks ago. My concern is the amount of extra work this creates:

1. A new module would need to be created similar to Module:Check for deprecated parameters that is essentially "Module:Check for legacy parameters"
2. Those parameters would need to be kept in the list of "known" parameters so as not to trigger that error
3. A whole new category of categories would need to be created and maintained: pages using Infobox <foo> with legacy parameters
4. Some arbitrary cutoff would need to be established, whether 3 months, 6 months, a year, etc. What if a revert happens after that cutoff? I totally get and agree that it is much less likely as time progresses... But the solution I had in mind would not have an expiration date. Unless the replacements are removed from the configuration file, they would run ad infinitum.

It would seem to me that still placing these pages into the unknown parameters category and then just having the bot check those categories would achieve the same goal with much less overhead... Maybe you have a different structure in mind that I'm not understanding...

In the end I would be happy with basically any solution that achieves the end goal. I just want to make sure that whatever solution we decide on, is maintainable and scalable. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 15:25, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Been thinking about it for a bit now this afternoon and I guess now I'm wondering how much this really matters... if a param is invalid (whether deprecated or removed entirely) it needs to be updated, and I suspect that even for recently-deprecated params that have been removed the number of pages populating the unknown parameters is relatively small... I feel it's similar to the "remove empty invalid params" discussion we keep coming back to - if occasionally someone puts in an invalid parameter, who really cares if it used to be valid or not? It still needs fixing. Primefac (talk) 15:35, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

who really cares if it used to be valid or not? It still needs fixing. EXACTLY! I totally 100% agree! The only reason the used to be valid of it all is relevant, is does the bot we are discussing have the ability to fix the parameter. If someone adds |favorite_color=red to an Infobox, that is an unknown parameter that the bot won't know what to do with, but that is fine. The bot can just skip that. The bot will only be interested in the parameters that used to be valid and now have been replaced with something else. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 15:56, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

If mostly-blind parameter renaming works, then it seems like this bot could mostly replace the AWB runs people are doing now. But how often are there special considerations for a parameter such that a blind "rename parameter X to Y, unless Y already exists in which case leave for human review" would do the wrong thing? Anomie⚔ 13:30, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

@Primefac and Anomie: do either of you know anything about running bots on Toolforge? Wondering if that is a possible avenue... Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 16:29, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

AnomieBOT runs on Toolforge. It seems pretty straightforward if you're using something well-supported like Python. wikitech:Help:Toolforge/Quickstart should get you started. AnomieBOT's perl needed some hacking, which I'm not sure I could easily reproduce at this point. 😅 Probably I should look into that. Anomie⚔ 16:58, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support, this would be really helpful, especially since it is not always clear what needs to be changed (sometimes the message tells you what to do, sometimes it doesn't).

For another example, try restoring Special:PermanentLink/1350010355 and get jumpscared by 8 arcane parameters you need to fix -- which is not necessarily intuitive given that this is the most recent article version prior to the AI edits (or was at the time), and the version is from less than 6 months ago. Now multiply that by 10 (at least), and you have the amount of time it takes to clean up one user's edits. Gnomingstuff

(I do have rollback but I don't use it for AI cleanup, given the amount of arguing over most AI-related subjects I doubt anything AI-related is uncontroversial enough to qualify for rollback) (talk) 16:26, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

I also agree that a bot along the lines that Zackmann proposes would be very useful. Dionysodorus (talk | contribs) 17:57, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

It seems like there is pretty universal agreement this would be helpful... The question is who actually has the time/knowledge/skills to make it happen... I will confess that I feel a bit over my head on this one and my python is pretty rusty... If someone else is willing to take the lead in writing the core logic, I am more than happy to act as a second set of eyes wherever possible, test initial implementations and to take the lead in setting up the config files and backfilling with the hundreds of deprecations that have been done in recent months. Is anyone willing to take this on? Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 18:07, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

I might be willing to code, but I think the category idea needs a little more exploration. It seems like it would be worth having a category like "bot migration" or "misspelled param" to narrow where a bot would run. The more narrow the pages targeted the less chance for error and easier verification. So with a parameter that can be bot-replaced like "imagesize" -> "image_size", if that had a dedicated category, it would be higher confidence that the bot will make good edits. A single bot could probably be used for multiple templates. A protected page could contain a wikitable or json with: template name, parameter-from, parameter-to. That'd be a lot more efficent than a bot continously inspecting every page with an unknown parameter that it can't do anything about. Thoughts? Dw31415 (talk) 19:36, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

So the theory here is just that. We would have a WP:TPE protected page that lists:

• Template name
• Unknown param category
• old-param
• corresponding new-param

Would be TPE protected to protect from a vandal inserting code that would auto-run on potentially hundreds of thousands of pages.

The bot would ONLY look pages that show up in the unknown parameter categories. Which if you look at ALL pages with unknown Infobox parameters, we are talking about 3,500 pages. Now the bot would only be looking at the specific sub-cats that are listed so would be far less than 3,500. Plus the bot would only change those params it can directly replace |old-param= with |new-param=. No other changes would be made. So... Your concern is totally valid, but if we use this type of architecture, I think we should be good. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 19:42, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah, I was confusing another category with 300,000 pages. This Category:Infoboxes with unknown parameters is much smaller. And probably running once a week is fine. The edit summary should link to some talk page that explains how to get it off the auto-replacment list. Dw31415 (talk) 19:58, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

That makes sense. 300k would be a ridiculous amount to parse for this. A couple hundred per day shouldn't be a problem though! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 00:24, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

I have something whipped up, but I want to test it for a bit before submitting a BRFA. It uses wiki-pages to gather tasks, and handles deprecated parameters pretty darn well. phuzion (talk) 19:52, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Woah. Phuzion way to take all the credit... I created the Sesame Street HOA testcase didn't I?! No appreciation... ^[sarcasm] Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 00:24, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Sesame Street HOA genuinely made me laugh. You get credit for sure! phuzion (talk) 01:01, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

• a little late to the conversation, but I think it is easy to create a programme for this task. Easier if there's a tracking category. In case there is no tracking category, a bot could listen to recent changes, and if a deprecated parameter is inserted then it can be replaced with current one. KiranBOT's amp task is something similar in spirit. It replaces undesired URL with desired URL. It properly works within cite web templates. With few tweaks, it should be able to perform this task. @Phuzion: let me know how it goes, if you don't want to work on it I'll be happy to work on it. —usernamekiran (talk) 21:29, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

  usernamekiran we got something cooking. Standby. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:26, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Hello to everyone following this thread. I wanted to announce that @Zackmann08 and I are approaching the BRFA phase for ParamBot, a new bot built to fix deprecated parameters in infobox templates.

The basic premise of this bot is as follows:

1. An infobox template has a parameter deprecated and replaced with a new parameter, e.g. |imagesize= → |image_size=, using a "Deprecated Parameters" category for tracking purposes. The old parameter is still supported, but throws an in-preview warning to editors.
2. The "Deprecated Parameters" category is cleaned out by bots such as User:PrimeBOT, User:ZackBot and User:PhuzBot, as well as manual work by users with WP:AWB and other tools.
3. Once the "Deprecated Parameters" category is cleaned up, the deprecated parameters code is removed from the infobox template, and the old parameter no longer works. Uses of the old parameter will result in the article getting placed into an "Unknown Parameters" category (assuming it exists), separate from the "Deprecated Parameters" category.
4. Editors create a rule as a subpage of User:ParamBot/Rules telling it what the old deprecated parameters were. In essence, we capture |imagesize= → |image_size= from the history of the template. This rule is "approved" and entered into service by listing the rule and its revision ID on the main Rules page.
5. The bot scans each "Unknown Parameters" category for templates that it supports on a daily basis. All articles in the category are scanned to check if any of the parameters inside the infobox match a parameter that should be replaced. The bot stops after 100 edits (configurable, but we will likely stick with this for the foreseeable future).
6. Parameters that match the rules are replaced according to the rules. The bot only replaces a parameter when the template no longer accepts the old parameter and does accept the new parameter. If a rule contains an old parameter that is still accepted by the template, or a new parameter that is not yet accepted by the template, that individual line of the rule is skipped.
7. Pages that have {{bots|deny=ParamBot}} or {{nobots}} are ignored, as are pages that have been edited by this bot in the past 30 days.

A few things to note: This bot was coded with the help of an AI model, but with extensive checking done by humans during its development. At every phase of its development, diff files were locally created for any edit that would have hypothetically occurred. Each of these diff files were manually reviewed by me, a 20 year Wikipedian, Bot Operator and heavy user of various editing tools. Any issues that were found were immediately dealt with during the development process. HOWEVER, this is not to say that there won't be issues during the bot approval process. I am enthusiastic about making this bot work for the community, and finding a way to make this work is something I am serious about.

@Anomie: When both parameters are present in an article, it's quite careful: If the new parameter is empty, the old value is moved over. If the values match, the old one is dropped. And if they differ, the article is listed for a human to review (or merged, if the rule is written that way). You can reference this table for a brief summary of exactly what happens in each case. A rename that changes the meaning of the value (as an example |weight_lbs= → |weight_kgs=) isn't something the bot can detect. However, the bot will only use the rules subpages that are approved to run, by being listed on the Rules page, along with the approved revision ID. Once that page is protected, the revision ID acts as an approval step that only template editors and admins can take. Newer revisions to the subpage do not take effect until the new revision ID is written to the main rules page. These rules are most frequently pulled directly from the template's history, and are a simple adaptation of the {{#invoke:Check for deprecated parameters|function}} code block. We currently have a request in to have the page template editor protected, limiting the number of non-admins able to make changes to the bot's behavior to 200 or so. phuzion (talk) 02:07, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for doing this work. Happy to code review or help admin the Toolforge account if that’s helpful. Thanks again. Dw31415 (talk) 02:54, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the offer! I should be able to get Toolforge up and running (I've already got the dev account from my time involved with Huggle), but if I run into any issues, I'll be sure to hit you up. phuzion (talk) 11:02, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

The request below has some common aspects. Would you be willing to share your code for this one? Dw31415 (talk) 23:03, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

@Dw31415: that request should be very easy to fix with a quick JWB/AWB run. The parameters are not changing, the values are. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:07, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Is there an approves group preference for JWB? I’m much more familiar with PyWikibot. Dw31415 (talk) 23:10, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

approves group preference??? Not sure what that is... If you have permission to use AWB, you can use JWB though. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:20, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant Wikipedia:Bot Approvals Group. Typo. Does BAG have a preference for JWB over PyWikibot? I use a Mac and don’t have AWB. Dw31415 (talk) 23:24, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

AH! Gotcha. So you do NOT need BAG approval to use JWB, unless you are doing unmonitored edits (like I'm currently doing with ZackBot). You can use it manually without BAG approval as long as you are manually checking each edit. But JWB is much, much faster than manually editing each page. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 23:59, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah! makes sense. I'll learn a little more about it. Dw31415 (talk) 00:19, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Give a holler if I can help! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 00:59, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

BRFA filed by Phuzion and I. -- Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 03:15, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

This bot has been Approved. and is now live! phuzion (talk) 23:34, 18 October 2026 (UTC)

Marking as {{BOTREQ}} per above. Tenshi! (Talk page) 18:31, 24 October 2026 (UTC)

Null edits?

Is there any bot that can just smash through a bunch of pages doing null edits?

The situation is that a badly formatted recent edit to {{Non-free book cover}} caused an absolute explosion of redlinked categories on the latest run of Special:WantedCategories, with almost 1,200 redlinks representing almost six times the usual number, because it caused the invocations of the template to start treating code that was intended as a sortkey, not as a category, as new categories.

The edit has been reverted and the redlinked categories are no longer appearing on the pages themselves — but the implicated categories aren't emptying out or leaving the redlinked category report, so that as of right now there are still over 1,000 redlinked categories on the report, which is further interfering with the process of finding and fixing the redlinked categories that weren't caused by that one template edit.

So is there any bot that can just do a quick one-off run through the categories on Special:WantedCategories, null-editing their contents to clear the ones that don't need an editor's direct attention? (The nulls would have to be to the individual pages that are appearing in the categories, not to the categories themselves.) Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 15:56, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

There weren't that many API requests, so I just did it without a BRFA. – DreamRimmer ■ 16:43, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks much Bearcat (talk) 17:14, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

Just as an answer to the question (for next time?) there exists User:ProcBot/PurgeList. Primefac (talk) 22:09, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

This purge task has been broken for quite a while now. Most of ProcBot's other tasks have also been stopped for a long time. – DreamRimmer ■ 01:19, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

Oh, fair enough; last I checked it was still running, but I will say it's been a minute. Primefac (talk) 13:02, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

WPMED banner run again

I've got a list of ~375 talk pages in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:WhatamIdoing/Sandbox&oldid=1382908954 that are already tagged for WikiProject Medicine. However, I want to make sure they are all tagged correctly:

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

If there are any other parameters in place, they should be retained as-is.

See also Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 88#WikiProject Medicine tagging again for prior work.

Thank you.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:26, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

I'd be willing to do this again, though I don't have time today to file a BRFA, will see about it tomorrow. Tenshi! (Talk page) 00:04, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Low enough edit count, would be better to post to WP:AWB/TASKS. Primefac (talk) 00:06, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Since Tenshi already has code and a one-time BFRA, can you or other Wikipedia:Bag approve a second run here? Just asking to reduce the ceremony. Dw31415 (talk) 00:26, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Oh, if it's just running the same task again, then go for it. OTRs are usually called for when one isn't expecting to have to do it again; should a need arise then I don't see an issue with it (especially since the edit count is low). Primefac (talk) 14:38, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Do you mind formalising that in the prior BRFA or do you want me to file another one? Tenshi! (Talk page) 15:36, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

While you’re waiting to hear back, you could do a trial of 50 based on above approval if that’s a helpful test to you. Dw31415 (talk) 16:55, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

You can't just do a trial with a bot without filing a BRFA and getting approval to do so. Primefac (talk) 20:07, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

I understood go for it to be your approval. My bad. Maybe we can define a path for AWB-like tasks to proceed with low ceremony but I appreciate you being so responsive to Tenshi and WAID so I guess it wasn’t an issue. Dw31415 (talk) 00:00, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

{{done}}. Primefac (talk) 20:07, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

And the run is {{BOTREQ}}. Tenshi! (Talk page) 21:08, 31 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank you! Now I get to go find out how to update a PagePile. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:02, 31 October 2026 (UTC)