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: Peter Karlsen (talk · contribs)

Time filed: 02:52, Monday October 18, 2010 (UTC)

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic

Programming language(s): Python

Source code available: Standard pywikipedia

Function overview: Removal of invisible comments left over from recent template maintenance

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): one time run

Estimated number of pages affected: 1000

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Yes, native to pywikipedia

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

Function details: I recently fixed a number of swapped svg icons on railroad templates, which required each template to be visually inspected to determine whether the icons had already been reversed by another user, using a semi-automated script, per Wikipedia:Bot_requests#svg_icon_swap. In the course of this process invisible comments of the form <!-- swapped CONTr and CONTl icons --> were added, to enable the script to automatically avoid templates I had previously reviewed, even if they had been moved to different page titles. Now that they are no longer needed, all such comments in the templates I edited would be removed.

Discussion[edit]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. MBisanz ^talk 05:25, 27 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. [1] is a permanent link to the edits. Peter Karlsen (talk) 20:18, 27 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

((BAG assistance needed)) Peter Karlsen (talk) 01:21, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really see the point to this. The comment isn't particularly confusing, so all this task is making 1000 edits (admittedly not a great deal) which don't actually change the rendered page? Please quickly outline how this bot meets these requirements: is useful; does not consume resources unnecessarily. Thanks - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 23:35, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Leaving the comments in place creates the impression that I didn't properly clean up after finishing my correction of the templates. Conceivably, leaving currently irrelevant comments laying about in wikitext which already employs some fairly complex syntax would be confusing to users new to editing railway map templates. Peter Karlsen (talk) 02:48, 5 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. Still not entirely convinced by this, but it's a quick one day task. For similar tasks in future however, you should look into finding a better method of flagging the pages which are already changed (one which doesn't require each page to be individually tagged as changed, for example, listing the changed pages on a user sub page). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 08:38, 5 November 2010 (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.