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

Time filed: 03:10, Friday, October 13, 2017 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic

Programming language(s): AWB

Source code available: AWB

Function overview: Fix double colons in internal links (i.e. [[::Test]]); see Special:LintErrors/multi-colon-escape

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia:Bot requests#Remove double colons from subpages of Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team

Edit period(s): One time run then monthly runs for Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team pages

Estimated number of pages affected: ~25,000?

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

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

Function details: Matching (?<!<nowiki>[^<]*)\[\[:: and replacing with [[:. This is an error that changes how the link is rendered on the page (i.e. it doesn't render as a link, it renders as just text). I'm unsure about the number of edits required since the error page lists about 3k while a database scan returns 25k.

Discussion[edit]

• Comment: 25K is probably closer to the real number. An insource search for "insource:/\[\[::/" finds 19,468 pages. It appears that Linter tagging is subject to the same problems described in T157670: "Changes to MediaWiki code related to parsing can leave links tables out of date". For example, Special:LintErrors/multi-colon-escape was empty in article space until I null-edited Ida Dehmel, and now that page is listed. That page was edited on 17 July 2017, less than three months ago; many WP pages have not been edited for years. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:17, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  Yeah, that's why I went with the higher number. My database is a couple weeks old and someone fixed a lot of them via meatbotting, but I wanted to be conservative on my estimates. A lot of the ones in that search though are brought over from Commons on the file pages, which was another reason for me to be unsure. Nihlus 14:38, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Second comment: Will the regex above be able to avoid the false positive in Array slicing? I'm not a good enough regex parser to figure it out. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:17, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  That's a good point. Any easy fix would be to tack ([A-Za-z]) to the end of the regex and then change the replace to [[:$1

  ...Actually, since that's the only instance in article space, the bot could just ignore Article space and the issue would be avoided. Primefac (talk) 12:39, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  There are only two instances of Article space errors, both previously mentioned: Array slicing and Ida Dehmel. Nihlus 14:38, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  I actually fixed Ida just before making my previous comment. Primefac (talk) 14:54, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: Someone might want to do a manual fix to pages containing \[\[::: (three colons) before setting this bot loose. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:24, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  There are six pages with three or more colons, should be easy to deal with before this happens. Primefac (talk) 12:32, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  Fixed. Nihlus 14:38, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Approved for trial (100 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 15:08, 15 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  Trial complete. @BU Rob13: See here. One issue arose from my list getting refreshed so that it included Array slicing as mentioned above, although it has been fixed. Nihlus 15:26, 15 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment: I fully support this bot for cleaning up most of the double-colon errors across Wikipedia. However, in relation to my original bot request, this would actually breaking links on "log" subpages of Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. These pages have double colons wherever the WP 1.0 bot didn't recognize the namespace. I have cleaned up the older pages that had issues with the File, WikiProject, and Category namespaces, and while those problems with the WP 1.0 bot were fixed, that bot is still not recognizing the Draft namespace. However, since none of that bot's maintainers are still active, it is continually adding new links to draft articles with double colons. Therefore, on subpages of Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team, the bot should be replacing \* '''\[\[::([^\n]*?)\]\]''' \(\[\[:([^\n]*?)\|talk\]\]\) with * '''[[:Draft:$1]]''' ([[Draft talk:$2|talk]]). --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 15:25, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  Thanks, Ahecht. I was going to exclude those pages since I figured they were already fixed (my database is older than the most recent fixes), but I can do those too. @BU Rob13: Would you like an additional trial? These pages are just a small subset of my list, so I can do a specific run on some of these pages if you would like. Nihlus 15:43, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  @Nihlus: Just run the code once semi-auto from your main account on one of those pages to verify it works then ping me with the diff. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 16:09, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  @BU Rob13: See here. Nihlus 16:17, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  @Ahecht: Looks fine to me, but can you check that diff as well to make sure it's behaving as you'd expect? ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 16:35, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  @BU Rob13: Looks good to me. There is one more corner case that I completely forgot to mention, which is when the WP 1.0 bot reports a renamed page, which would need a regex from \* \[\[::([^\n]*?)\]\] renamed→* '''[[:Draft:$1]]''' renamed (as in this diff). --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 17:36, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  @Ahecht: Those only have one colon, though, right? Nihlus 17:42, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  @Nihlus: Oops, that was a bit of a misleading example, because Anomalocaris had already removed the first colon here. A better example would be Special:Diff/804902874. --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 18:29, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  @Ahecht: I figured that was the case. The code above works, so I can add it to my list for when I fix Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team pages. Do you know if WP 1.0 bot is going to be fixed soon? If not, does this need to be an ongoing task rather than a one time run? Nihlus 18:34, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

  Neither of the developers of WP 1.0 bot are still active. I have pinged both of them, and filed a bug report on the GitHub page, but I haven't heard of any progress. I would assume for now that this has to be an ongoing task. --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 18:44, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@BU Rob13: Any update on this one? Nihlus 20:00, 19 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Nihlus: Bit of a busy week, but I'll check over the trial tonight. Sorry for the wait. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 21:48, 19 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Nihlus: Can you explain this edit? There's more going on here than I would expect. [1] ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 13:38, 20 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like its the pipe trick, not something that the bot did specifically. [[:|]] got converted (properly) to [[:|:]] when the page was saved. It didn't do this before because it didn't recognize [[::|]] as a valid wikilink. No idea about the [[:de:]] thing, though. Primefac (talk) 13:42, 20 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The [[::de:|]] to [[:de:|de:]] also looks like the bot removed the colon and the MW software automatically processed a WP:PIPETRICK link. Harmless, I'd say. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:13, 20 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging BU Rob13 for an update. Nihlus 02:14, 23 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 11:25, 23 October 2017 (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.