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 The result of the discussion was Withdrawn by operator.

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

Time filed: 14:57, Monday October 28, 2013 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): Python (Pywikipedia)

Source code available: [1]

Function overview: To run the same logic that is in the WP:AFCH "Clean Submission" functionality so that reviewers/submitters don't have to hunt for the submission box/multiple submission boxes

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Articles_for_creation#OTRS_question

Edit period(s): Daily

Estimated number of pages affected: Depends on how many submissions could do with a good cleaning.

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): No

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes

Function details: The purpose is to make it a little bit easier for new users/AFC volunteers to find the most recent AfC submission banner, to clean up common issues with an AFC submission, to make sure that ArticleSpace categories are not active on the page, etc. Essentially everything that the "Clean" button does in WP:AFCH. Initially, the bot will be ran over every one of the Category:AfC pending submissions by age children starting with the oldest. Once we're in maintenance mode, the bot will only consider submissions that are in the 7 days or less sub-categories. The bot will be essentially driven off the individual day categories to paralellize it (and make it nice to run on the labs compute cluster) and only make sticky edits if there's something to clean up. If there's no change then the bot will not bother with attempting to perform the null edit.

The bot should not be exclusion compliant as the AfC submission pages do not belong to an individual user. The bot will be improving the pages by rearranging some of the portions of the page (move the submission banner to the top, Fixing AFC comment templates, etc.) so an improvement is worth the notice of edit.

I intend to use the edit summary [[Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/HasteurBot 6|HasteurBot]]: Cleaning AfC submission if this task is approved. Hasteur (talk) 14:57, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion[edit]

• I support the idea of this bot, but think that waiting up to seven days is too long. Most of the submissions I have seen have two or three back to back submissions templates on the bottom placed there within minutes of each other and then often one more the next day or the day after. Rarely do I have see multiple submission templates spaced out more than two or three days, and I think this bot task should reflect that. I would prefer to see this bot check for and clean "new" submissions every 4-16 hours and not wait any longer than 3 days once the existing batch has been processed. Technical 13 (talk) 17:25, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think you're confused. Each day, the bot will troll the "Zero Days", "1 Days", "2 days", ..., "7 days" categories. At most you're looking at 7 days as a very worst case (bot was offline for several days). Hasteur (talk) 18:04, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• This sounds fantastic. The only downside to the 7-day lag is that the submitting author may still be confused if he polls the page a couple of days later and thinks, "Hey, didn't I already submit this?" Perhaps an easier way to handle this would be for the submit logic to either 1) move the AFC template at the top instead of the bottom (don't know if that's possible, haven't looked at code), or 2) if that's not possible, add a tag to the page, e.g., Category:AfC submissions requiring AFCH scrub, and the bot could scan for those, and remove the tag as part of processing. I purposely use the word SCRUB instead of CLEANUP, because seeing those words may confuse editors and reviewers that it refers to content standards. One other note about cleanup: it adds spaces around heading text. There is no need for that: they have no functional effect, and WP:MOS neither encourages nor discourages them. Dovid (talk) 19:29, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Dovid The way I have the bot written in my head, the average delay is going to be less than 1 day (24 hours). I traverse the other categories just in case and also to help clean. I'm intending to extract all the cleanup routines so that AfC volunteers won't need to click the "Clean" button. I can co ahead and change the edit summary to say scrub, but wanted the edit summary to be as close as what the AFCH tool says. Hasteur (talk) 19:34, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • I hear what you are saying. But it sounds like you would have to crawl all AfC pages, including those you had already processed. For efficiency, you want the page either tagged at submission and untagged (or tag modified) by your bot, or you want to tag the page as you process it so that it no longer appears in your queue. Dovid (talk) 19:40, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • We want to crawl all of the pages that are in the 7 day window so that if a editor makes a change that would be caught by the AFCH clean function, the bot will have the page in really good shape prior to a Volunteer coming around to review. We already have categories that increment how long the page has been submitted for review for. Without adjusting the addition of submission logic it will be nigh impossible to add the category when a regular user submits a page for review. The ((AFC submission/pending)) template is actually quite clever as Technical 13 can verify. Hasteur (talk) 20:06, 28 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The clean function removes a lot of guff and scaffolding that's put in place for the newbie editor, is that right? Will they be confused when it's all removed? Josh Parris 08:34, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Josh as of #203 it removes less scaffolding and Hasteur's proposal is that it cleans as the helper script would. So, no, it shouldn't remove any of that (and if you see something that is, feel free to comment on the ticket I linked and it will be fixed). :) Technical 13 (talk) 11:25, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Trial[edit]

Approved for trial (5 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Let's roll this out to the end of the driveway and back again. Josh Parris 11:38, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'll be out of town for a bit so earliest I'll work on this is a week from now. Hasteur (talk) 13:45, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No worries, we'll wait with baited breath. Josh Parris 21:07, 5 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Hasteur:, how's it going? Josh Parris 09:05, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Still working on it. Having to transliterate from Javascript to Python is taxing my brain. User:Hasteur/HasteurBot6 TestPage is the page I'm working on exercising the cleanup logic. Hasteur (talk) 18:39, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps there's a way to invoke the JavaScript on the web-page from Python - i.e. use Python to drive a browser. Josh Parris 01:39, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Javascript can be really fussy in terms of which browser is executing it. Javascript wouldn't work that well for handling the many pages that the process is going to run over. It's just a matter of figuring out which portions I need to rework and which ones I don't. Doing a screen driver means having a desktop machine crawling. By implementing in python (my prefered language) we can split it out over the Labs compute cluster and have it massively parallel. It's going to take a few more days as I need to exercise each portion of the cleanup logic I roll the bot down the driveway on real AfC submissions. Hasteur (talk) 01:52, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Hasteur:, how's it going? Josh Parris 04:57, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To be honest, been really crazy busy past few weeks, and now I'm an advocate in a ArbCom case. Making some progress. Realizing how nasty regexes are. [2] is the progress I've made (though you're probably not that interested in that side). [3] is the diffs to my testbed page where I'm exercising the code to make sure I hit all the critical portions of the code. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this off this week. Hasteur (talk) 00:57, 23 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

((OperatorAssistanceNeeded|D)) Anything new about this? Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 01:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I did finally get through initial coding. I was able to get it working on my test page, but it's still not 100% to where I want it to be. I think I'll have some time this weekend. Hasteur (talk) 01:33, 10 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

((OperatorAssistanceNeeded|D)) Another two weeks passed. Anything new? 46.107.88.236 (talk) 16:53, 24 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As I'm in danger of being topic banned from AfC for trying to uphold standards I'm giving up on this project. Withdrawn by operator. Hasteur (talk) 17:06, 24 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Close per botop. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 23:56, 24 January 2014 (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.