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

Time filed: 08:04, Wednesday, July 25, 2018 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: supervised

Programming language(s): AWB

Source code available:

Function overview: Tag article talk pages with ((Vital article)) based on the list of articles at WP:VA5.

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles/Level/5#Bot_tagging_of_L5_articles, User_talk:Feminist#Vital_articles

Edit period(s): As needed

Estimated number of pages affected: ~6,735 initially (30,124 level 5 or above vital articles on the list - 10,002 level 4 or above vital articles on the list - 13,387 articles in Category:All Wikipedia level-5 vital articles based on presence of talk page template)

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

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

Function details: Basically I'm asking for permission to route edits I'm currently performing through my bot account, so that it doesn't clog up watchlists. User:PowerBOT, which has added such templates in the past, has been inactive for a while, and both I and User:Zingarese have added these templates using AWB.

Operation is semi-manual, i.e. I prepare lists of articles of the same quality and from the same subpage of WP:VA5, so that AWB would insert the same text in each talk page in the same list. Articles already with the ((vital article)) template are skipped, but it's also possible for this proposed bot to replace existing instances of the template if that is preferred.

Discussion[edit]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:32, 25 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. feminist (talk) 13:29, 25 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Initial trial looks OK, left feedback request notes at Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles/Level/5#Bot_tagging_of_L5_articles and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vital Articles. One week hold for any feedback. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:14, 25 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment the problem I've found (which prevented me from fully automating bot tagging) is how to handle redirects and page moves when tagging; on a fairly regular basis the Vital list needs to be updated after a page move, rather than changing the article templates themselves. For L4 it's probably 25% of the changes (as all the pages have been tagged at this point); for L5 it may be less of an issue. power~enwiki (π, ν) 18:48, 26 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • My approach is to skip any page without a WikiProject class parameter, so this shouldn't be a problem. Of course any AWB implementation is going to be less sophisticated than an actual bot, but it works well enough. Agreed that it's less of an issue for L5, I'd say it's closer to 1% where the Vital list and the actual article title is mismatched. feminist (talk) 15:34, 27 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:39, 1 August 2018 (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.