The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Operator: Alphachimp

Automatic or Manually Assisted:Automatic

Programming Language(s):AWB

Function Summary: Sorting Category:Articles to be merged into by-month categories

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): continuous until complete, then once daily

Edit rate requested: 4-6 per minute

Already has a bot flag (Y/N):Y

Function Details: At present Category:Articles to be merged is a >10000 article messy backlog. I'd like to go in with my bot and convert the tags to by-month categories, starting with this month. It'd be something like you see in Category:Cleanup by month and Category:Articles that need to be wikified. The bot would be doing a simple AWB find/replace with the CURRENTMONTH template.

Discussion[edit]

Surely if we had a bot using pywikipedia to replace them with the month they were actually tagged by using the last edit of the article? Just doing all the untagged ones will also tag that were possibly added last month. But I do believe some other bots are using your method, so don't take this as a protest.--Andeh 13:28, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This seems very reasonable. Perhaps we could have the bot run a small handful (2-10) of these edits, just to demonstrate its purpose. I don't see the need for a full blown trial, especially if other bots are doing the same task. So go ahead and run a small trial with the bot. Post the results and then we'll officially approve the request without a full-blown trial period. -- RM 16:19, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, check out the last few edits by Typochimp. I've created Template:Merge-date. If you guys give me the green light, I'll go ahead and make similar derivatives for the other merge templates. In response to Andy's comment: yes, we will be listing all of the articles in September 2006 now. Theoretically, as we move further and further from this month, Category:Articles to be merged since September 2006 should get smaller and smaller. Also, if anybody else ever wanted to come through and sort all of September 2006 into by-month categories, everything would be there to fix. alphaChimp^(talk) 06:04, 23 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Approved. No one else has any objections, I've checked the examples and they look fine. Go for it. -- RM 02:11, 26 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.