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

Operator: Anomie⚔

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic, unsupervised

Programming Language(s): Perl

Function Summary: Search for orphan reference contents in wikilinked articles if the history search fails.

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Continuous

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

Function Details: This is a request for addition of function to my existing task approved at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT.

While investigating pages that AnomieBOT was unable to fix, I noticed that many were due to someone copying a passage (including a child ref) from some other article. Often, either the "victim" page wikilinks to the page the passage was copied from or vice versa.

I have developed code to scan all pages wikilinked from the current page and search for references there, and code to scan all pages that wikilink to the current page (if there are less than 1000 of these) and search for references there. The first will only be called if the existing history scan fails to rescue an orphan, and the second will only be called if the first has tried and failed. If either finds multiple versions for the same named ref, it will post on the article's talk page to ask for help.

This code can be seen in the indicated section at User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/OrphanReferenceFixer.pm.

As this is a major new function and not just a bugfix or extension of the existing approved functions, I thought it best to request approval for the new function. Anomie⚔ 02:58, 15 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

((BAGAssistanceNeeded))

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. BJ^Talk 03:06, 19 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. Edits are here. One thing I intend to change is to specify the article in question instead of saying "this article" in the talk page edits, but that's fairly minor. Anomie⚔ 11:53, 19 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

• That right there, is simply awesome :) Good work!  Approved. SQL^{Query me!} 18:45, 20 September 2008 (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.