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: Quadell

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic, supervised

Programming Language(s): Perl, Perlwikipedia

Function Summary: Create redirects for alternate names for politicians.

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): one-time run (or several times, in chunks)

Edit rate requested: 6 edits per minute

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

Function Details: This is broken into subtasks.

1. Subtask one is as follows: for each existing U.S. Senator and Representative, past or present, polbot can auto-generate a list of alternate names. For example, the name "Henry Ulysses Brown" suggests "Henry U. Brown" and "Henry Brown". This code also looks in the initial paragraph of the article for bolded text, and assumes that text is an alternate name as well. The input for a plain list of politicians is at User:Polbot/altnames/todo, the names that have potential alternate names are at User:Polbot/altnames/inprocess, and the ones which do not suggest alternate names (and are not useful for this task) are listed at User:Polbot/altnames/done. I have run several tests on this. This task does not involve editing pages, except for the three lists linked to above. I'll go over these manually to look for errors.
2. The second subtask, and the phase I'm really asking permission for here, will scan the "inprocess" list for redlinks, and will create redirects for each missing alternate name.

• This will help a lot, since often the same politician is listed in multiple places under different names. Since running polbot's first task, two different users have recommended that polbot perform this new task. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 16:35, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
• As I said above, subtask #1 requires manual verification before subtask #2 runs. One example of an error is that the Austin Blair article lists "Civil War Governor" as a bolded nickname for him. Civil War Governor should be a redirect, but Civil W. Governor and Civil Governor should not be. Once I manually delete the incorrect suggestions, task 2 will create the rds. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 18:22, 5 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial. Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. 50 redirects, then report back. --ST47Talk 00:44, 8 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! It's now running, breaking, debugging, re-running, etc. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 14:37, 8 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Trial has been successfully completed. She's ready for the big time! – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 20:13, 8 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. --ST47Talk 15:00, 10 June 2007 (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.