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: Magioladitis

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic, supervised

Programming language(s): AWB

Source code available: AWB is open source.

Function overview: WP:CHECKWIKI error fixing

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): WP:CHECKWIKI

Edit period(s): Weekly

Estimated number of pages affected: Some hundreds per week

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Y

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

Function details: Yobot will run weekly in articles generated by CHECKWIKI toolserver (http://toolserver.org/~sk/cw/enwiki/index.htm) to do AWB general fixes. This will enable auto-fixing in at least 29 WP:CHECKWIKI errors. More details on which errors can automatically can be fixed can be found in User:Magioladitis/AWB_and_CHECKWIKI. Autotagging will be done at the same time.

Recall that User:FrescoBot fixes 1 or 2 Checkwiki errors too and that Yobot has approved to do generalfixes+autotagging in other occasions (BRFA 11, BRFA 13, etc.)

AWB will run with "Skip if no changes", "Skip if only whitespace", "Skip if only casing is changed", etc. activated. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:42, 6 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]


Discussion[edit]

((BAGAssistanceNeeded)) Magioladitis (talk) 15:07, 13 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Which Checkwiki functions/fixes will be it processing? Peachey88 (Talk Page · Contribs) 09:53, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Check list in User:Magioladitis/AWB_and_CHECKWIKI which I mentioned in the description. All the ones with green and yellow. Errors: 2, 6, 9, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25, 26, 37-39, 44-46, 48, 51-55, 57, 61, 63-66 (64 is done by FrescoBot too), 76, 77, 86, 88-91. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:47, 14 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
How it will work: Load all lists of pages that have are reported having the specific issues and run genfxies+autotagging with appropriate skip options. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:57, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
"Skip if only minor genfixes" and "skip if only whitespace changed" will be activated. I don't think there will be any insignificant changes. We can make some test edits to see and we discuss it again. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:47, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. I loaded pages with error 53 (Interwiki before last category). I don't have time to give diffs right now. I 'll do later. Please note: Moving interwikis is a minor genfix for AWB so I had to disactivate the "Skip if only minor fixes" for this one. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:07, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Diffs of the first 12 edits: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. For more diffs check edits of User:Yobot from 14:57, 20 July 2010 until 15:03, 20 July 2010. All seem fine. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:14, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Excepting #11, they appear to be fairly insignificant changes that made no change on the rendered text... ? Here is a list of the 50 contribs built using offset [13]. –xenotalk 12:43, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Since they are in the CHECKWIKI list someone will/has to fix them. Some people do this manually and this is slow. Right now it's a big backlog to this particular error. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:50, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Will defer to my learned colleagues on this, but personally I think that edits like this that just move around the bottom business should really be done only in conjunction with more necessary edits (which is why it's included in AWB as a general fix). –xenotalk 13:10, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
We could limit ourselves to certain errors then? -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:13, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, my thoughts are that only the critical and honest-to-goodness problems should be botted. Of course, if the other minor fixes can be done while those "more important fixes" are done, that's fine - but just moving around undisplayed elements doesn't strike me as a good use of resources. –xenotalk 19:16, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
For example, I think we agree that all DEFAULTSORT errors (errors 6 and 88-91) should be fixed. I am waiting for suggestions for more. I used to spent my Saturdays fixing CHECKWIKI errors semi-manually so I would prefer if a bot was doing it for me. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:08, 21 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's important to reduce the number of articles with all these problems so new users don't inherit bad habits. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:31, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I have some sympathy with that view, however the reality is that for a number of reasons (some more valid some less so) changes below a certain threshold are not acceptable en-masse. What would be useful, however, would be to find a way to monitor a given error, presumably once it is in GFs or being fixed relatively widely it will be exponential decay plus a smattering of new cases, then at some point, maybe 20%, maybe 5%, allow the remaining cases to be swept up. In many instances this fix could then be removed 9when we are supporting a deprected way of doing things for example). Rich Farmbrough, 12:46, 22 July 2010 (UTC).[reply]
They are monitored a bit. All the errors above are fixed by GFs. Checking http://toolserver.org/~sk/cw/index.htm you can see if they go up or down. Especially the minor errors go up because they remain unmaintained by bots. At least we could do the following:
  • Regular runs for all defaultsort related errors (errors 6 and 88-91) and some more (for example error 17 -cat dupe has 17,026 pages backlog!)
  • One one-off run for the rest to reduce the backlog
  • Two more errors are maintained already by FrescoBot (wikilink equal to text and spacing)
-- Magioladitis (talk) 12:57, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

((BAGAssistanceNeeded)) Magioladitis (talk) 15:44, 29 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand why this can't be done during normal editing with AWB. Making separate changes for pure wikitext fixes that change nothing about the rendering is unnecessary. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:12, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

ListasBot for example fixes |listas= in WPBiography. We could run Yobot to fix errors in DEFAULTSORT like wrong capitalisation, special characters, extra blanks, etc. in order to have pages properly ordered inside categories.
Moreover, we have a backlog. That's the main problem. For example wrong place of punctuation in relation to references has some thousands pages backlog and this changes the rendering. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:24, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a table of the possible fixes and how they affect rendering. Feel free to update/correct.

Error Description AWB Changes Rendering
2 Article with <br\> or <\br> or <br.> Yes Yes
3 Article with <ref> and no <references /> Partial Yes
6 DEFAULTSORT with special letters Yes Yes
7 Headlines start with three "=" Partial Yes
9 Categories more at one line Yes No
10 Square brackets not correct end Partial Yes
17 Category double Yes No
18 Category first letter small Yes No
20 The article had a &dagger; and not †. Yes No
22 Category with space Yes No
25 Headline hierarchy Partial Yes
26 HTML text style element <b> Yes No
37 Title with special letters and no DEFAULTSORT Partial Hm...
38 HTML text style element <i> Yes No
39 HTML text style element <p> Partial No
44 Headlines with bold Partial No
45 Interwiki double Yes No
46 Square brackets not correct begin Partial Yes
48 Title in text Yes Yes
51 Interwiki before last headline Yes No
52 Category before last headline Yes No
53 Interwiki before last category Yes No
54 Break in list Yes Yes
55 HTML text style element <small> double Yes Hm...
57 Headlines end with colon Yes Yes
61 Reference with punctuation Yes Yes
63 HTML text style element <small> in ref, sub or sup Yes Yes
64 Link equal to linktext Yes No
65 Image description with break Yes No
66 Image description with full <small> Yes Yes
76 Link with no space Yes Yes
77 Image description with partial <small> Yes Yes
78 Reference double Partial Yes
80 External link with line break Partial Yes
81 Reference tag in article double Partial Yes
86 Link with two brackets to external source Yes Yes
88 DEFAULTSORT with blank at first position Yes No
90 DEFAULTSORT with lowercase letters Yes No

With yellow I have those that are partially done by AWB i.e. in almost all cases. With green I have those done by AWB in all cases. By "Hm..." I mean that it doesn't change the appearance of the page but page's placement in categories.

-- Magioladitis (talk) 08:58, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

38 errors in total. I could get approval those which change rendering for example. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:45, 5 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

((BAGAssistanceNeeded)) Magioladitis (talk) 12:44, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm leaning towards approving this in the next day or two. MBisanz talk 04:51, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
 Approved. MBisanz talk 04:27, 13 August 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.