The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: GoingBatty (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 23:04, Friday March 16, 2012 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): AWB

Source code available: AWB

Function overview: Remove article categories from user pages

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): WP:USERNOCAT, Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 46#Remove article categories from User pages

Edit period(s): Multiple runs

Estimated number of pages affected:

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Y

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

Function details: On user pages, change any article categories from [[Category:Foo]] to [[:Category:Foo]] (e.g. this link)

How will you determine if a category should not be removed? Josh Parris 06:36, 17 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

When making my list, I will search for user pages that contain article categories, such as those on Wikipedia:Database reports/Polluted categories that are not created by templates. GoingBatty (talk) 14:48, 17 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

How will you determine if a category should not be removed? Josh Parris 00:30, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

On the Bot requests page I had a go at doing this; it is really quite simple and there is a link there to all the edits I did with my main account using AWB. I'm going to request another one in a minute for duplicated functionality. Rcsprinter (warn) 18:21, 17 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

If a user page is in one article category, the bot will update all article categories on the page. The bot will not be run against administration categories such as Category:Wikipedians. GoingBatty (talk) 00:37, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, but how do you tell the difference between an article category and some other category? Josh Parris 00:39, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The bot won't know the difference. In order to find user pages to fix, I will use AWB to search for all user pages in some subcategory of Category:Articles, such as Category:Films or Category:Companies established in 2011. GoingBatty (talk) 01:13, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

And then delink all categories on that page? Yeah, all isn't that great. Is there some way you can be smarter about it? You seem to have a concept of "article categories", is there some way of enumerating them, or alternatively enumerating categories that are permitted on a user page? Either that, or I'm going to suggest this becomes a supervised/manual task where you clean up any inappropriately delinked cats afterwards. Josh Parris 02:33, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

How about excluding categories that start with "Wikipedia" by using F&R rule: "\[\[Category:(.*)\]\](?<!Wikipedia.*)" → "[[:Category:$1]]"? This would change [[Category:Living people]] to [[:Category:Living people]] but not change [[Category:Wikipedians in Oshkosh]]. GoingBatty (talk) 03:31, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You might want to make that case insensitive.

I'm not convinced the entire problem will be solved via this method (I'm thinking templates need targeting too), but it's a start. I suspect that you're going to have a high false-positive rate. Let's do 50 automatically in Category:Living people, you tell me how many cats got disabled incorrectly:

I will make it case insensitive - thanks for the suggestions. Templates do need targeting too, but that's outside the scope of this bot request. For example, the bot won't remove Category:Ship infoboxes without an image from user pages, since the bot won't change ((infobox ship begin)). GoingBatty (talk) 00:13, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

For infoboxes, what really needs to happen is some template logic to only add the cat if the template is in mainspace. Josh Parris 01:40, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

And for Category:Ship infoboxes without an image, it's not a bad thing that user space pages are in that cat - it is a hidden category, and it allows other editors to find articles as they're being worked on prior to moving them into article space. Josh Parris 02:02, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. to note the prevalence of false-positives. Remember to review afterwards and clean-up after any messes made. Josh Parris 23:53, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. Here are the 50 edits the bot made. It appears that only article catgeories were changed, so there was no mess to clean up.

In this edit, only one of the nine article categories was changed. Adding a question mark to the find rule to make the regex non-greedy will fix the issue:

\[\[Category:(.*?)\]\](?<!Wikipedia.*) → [[:Category:$1]]

GoingBatty (talk) 02:21, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good. I fixed the one in that link you just gave, but all the rest are fine. Don't think there is much of a false positive risk. Rcsprinter (converse) 14:54, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Rcsprinter - I saw so concerned not to make a 51st edit with the bot that I ignored the obvious option of fixing it manually with my regular account. GoingBatty (talk) 01:40, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. MBisanz ^talk 03:13, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.