Operator: Nettrom (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)
Time filed: 20:20, Monday July 30, 2012 (UTC)
Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic
Programming language(s): Python (using the pywikipediabot rewrite framework)
Source code available: source code on bitbucket
Function overview: Update Wikipedia:Community portal/Opentask regularly
Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): The task was handled by User:FlBot but stopped in Feburary 2012. Having another bot take over the task has been discussed previously, e.g. Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 41#User:FlBot replacement, but apparently nothing has happened.
Edit period(s): once every hour
Estimated number of pages affected: 1
Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes
Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes
Function details: The bot runs on the Toolserver and uses its database to find a handful of random pages from several categories containing pages in need of improvement. Each category has an associated ID which matches the ID of a span element on the Opentask page. Once a list of pages is generated it substitutes the content inside each span element using the IDs to identify which category it is replacing.
For the long term there has been interest in testing other strategies for selection of articles to potentially replace the random selection, see for instance meta:Research:Community portal redesign. Thus it is likely that the underlying algorithm for picking the pages will change at some point in the future, while the rest of the bot's functionality stays intact.
Approved for trial (3 days). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Seems simple enough (restricted to one page, replacing an inactive bot), so let's have a trial. I'm also interested in knowing what percent of articles in the open tasks area are processed over the course of the time they're up, and whether it makes sense to update less (or even more?) frequently. — Earwig talk 20:03, 3 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Trial complete.
The bot's edits to Wikipedia:Community Portal/Opentask during the trial period can be found in this listing.
The source code link was updated on August 8 to reflect that it also updated the section of re-listed AfDs, which FlBot also used to do. Thus the last five edits the bot made (19:19, 20:19, 21:20, 22:20, and 23:19 UTC on August 8) also updated that section.
One issue that came up during the trial was handling delays in the system. During the Wikipedia downtime on August 6 the cronjob ended up queueing for a long time before finally running and updating the page at 18:05 UTC. The next cronjob executed at 18:19 UTC, leading to just 14 minutes between the two updates. I considered adding some code to make sure the page doesn't get updated too quickly, e.g. if it detects such a short delay since last update it'll skip one, but thought I'd solicit feedback on the issue first.
Apart from that things appear to have run smoothly. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 00:00, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]