This is anarchive of past discussions onWikipedia:Bot requests.Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on thecurrent main page.
WikiProject Bot for Auto-Assessing Pre-Defined Article Lists
WikiProjects (and individual users) often created tables or lists of articles and their associated article assessments. As an example,Wizardman createdUser:Wizardman/Packers-Browns Connection to track the assessment of a specific set of articles (User:Community Tech bot sort of does this for Popular Pages already based on articles within a specific WikiProject). However, these tables or lists, especially the larger they get, can become out-of-date. I'm wondering if there is an opportunity for a bot to automate this.
The idea would be that a user could create a page, either in their user space or the Wikipedia space, that would automatically get updated by the bot every 2 weeks to show revised assessments. This initial input could be one of two options: a specific category or a user-generated list. Either way, after the initial input, the bot would format the list into a table like Wizardman's and then automatically updated every two weeks (similar to Community Tech Bot's timing). Thoughts? « Gonzo fan2007(talk) @16:02, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
For the user generated list, should it use some existing page with a list (i.e. could be an existing page in the user's userspace) or something else?Tenshi! (Talk page)17:06, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
Tenshi Hinanawi, I struggled with that one. Obviously the easiest input would be an established category. But I can imagine, similar to the example above, that users would be interested in generating their own lists. Maybe a simple bulleted list could be the input, in addition to a category? I'm open to whatever makes most sense. « Gonzo fan2007(talk) @17:45, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
This could better be done by a completely separate website (sort of like how edit information is better displayed in xtools rather than in your own userpage).GalStar (talk) (contribs)06:04, 25 August 2025 (UTC)
playing_years1 and playing_team1 (2, 3, 4, etc) in the CFL infobox will just become "teams" in the NFL infobox. Seethis edit for an example.
The honors parameters in the CFL infobox like "CFLAllStar" will all be thrown under the "highlights" parameter as bulleted lists in the NFL infobox.Example edit.
I've been looking at doing this on and off for a while. I'll throw some tracking categories in there to see how crazy I need to get with the architecture of the code.Primefac (talk)21:36, 24 August 2025 (UTC)
{{WikiProject Medicine}} →{{WikiProject Medicine |importance=Low |society=yes}}
This is the same type of request asWikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 84#WikiProject bot except that this time, I'm providing a hand-curated list of articles that need to be tagged (checked by two editors) instead of relying on a search.
@Tenshi Hinanawi: I have already written the code for this. I started working on it soon after WhatamIdoing made the request. Let me know if you would like me to share it, as I have some other things to take care of. –DreamRimmer■17:07, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
{{resolved}}thousands of articles are using plain arrow images rather than the dedicated templates for indicating fluctuations in numbers across articles. these are:
this is obviously bad for accessibility (these images lack good descriptions for screen readers, e.g. "green arrow up"), for visual design (they have a white background that clashes in dark mode) and for maintainability (they are long strings that need to copy-pasted between articles and not centralised in one template).
the solution is quite simple and may be done speedily with a simple search and replace. this may either be done with the templates above or the helper formatting template{{fluc}} for numbers values. note that for formatting, if the first option is chosen, a non-breaking space needs to be inserted between the arrow and following numbers.Juwan (talk)10:00, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
Impru20 appears to have attempted these changes, but another run is needed to fix erroneous edits to{{increase}} and its sibling templates.{{increase|10px}}, as seenin this diff, is not valid, per the template and its documentation. It needs to be changed to{{increase|size=10px}} or just{{increase}}, which defaults to 11px.{{decrease}} and{{steady}} need the same change. –Jonesey95 (talk)14:35, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
thank you to him for making these changes, though I see no reason to manually increase the size of these templates here.Juwan (talk)20:10, 6 November 2025 (UTC)
Convert calls to Template:Infobox mapframe
I have been working on converting calls toTemplate:Infobox mapframe to use the Module call that is built into the parent Infobox.Here is an example. These have to be customized for each different Infobox run I have done.This search shows there are approximately 4,100 pages using{{Infobox station}} that can be converted to use the native mapframe. I have a substitution template (User:Zackmann08/mapframe station) setup so that you can do the following:
Find (with mgi flags):\n\s*\|\s*mapframe\s*=\s*yes\s*\n^\s*\|\s*mapframe-custom\s*=\s*\{\{infobox mapframeReplace:\n{{subst:User:Zackmann08/mapframe station
So far, done about 30 or so and they all seem to work just fine. I'd rather not do a 4,000+JWB run, and while I have done bots in the past, I'm not currently setup to write/run bot scripts... So if someone wanted to write a bot script to do this that would be fantastic and greatly appreciated!
Note that this should have NO noticeable change to the page it is run on. It is purely arefactor to make use of the underlying Module code in a better way. See alsoWikipedia:Mapframe maps in infoboxes.
I'd be happy to file a BRFA on this, but I did want to let you know that your regex misses about 1/4 of the articles, mostly around articles that use the|embedded= parameter rather than|mapframe-custom=. Seems like there are a few other parameters within{{Infobox mapframe}} that will need to be added to the subst template, as well. One example isAltstadt Spandau (Berlin U-Bahn), which uses{{Infobox mapframe}} as an argument to|embedded=.Phuzion (talk)15:44, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
@Phuzion: one thing with the|embedded= is that you need to watch out for a case where there is also another infobox embeded... I've come across a number of cases where embedded has both{{infobox mapframe}} AND{{Infobox designation list}} for example. My current code will blow up if that happens so it has to be manually resolved. You may be able to solve that, but another option is to just not handle the|embedded= case in a bot run and leave those for me (or someone else) to do manually. That would still take a huge chunk out of the 4,000+ pages, but I will leave that to you to decide.Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing)17:46, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
Yep, I caught that onUnion Station (Toronto), which has those exact two templates. Let me see if I can come up with a way to filter it down to articles that JUST have{{Infobox mapframe}} within|embedded=. If you come up with anything, definitely ping me here or on my talkpage.Phuzion (talk)20:28, 9 November 2025 (UTC)
Alright, I think I'm pretty close to getting this working. @Zackmann08 Can you please update your substitution template to include the following parameters, which are commonly found in{{Infobox mapframe}} when found in|embedded=?
|stroke-colour=
|marker-colour= (just an alternate spelling of|marker-color= which already exists in the subst template)
Massive change of sortkeys from East Timor to Timor-Leste
Hello,
A number of articles and categories were renamed last year fromEast Timor toTimor-Leste, following thismove discussion. However many articles and categories still have category sortkeys with the old name, ending up being sorted wrong.
It appears there are24881 pages(248 total category listings) with "Timor-Leste" in the name and "East" in a category sortkey:quarry:query/97449. Might be better forWP:AWBREQ instead of here, or maybe it could be done manually.Anomie⚔22:24, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
Each of these edits needs to be considered carefully to see if it will cause Linter errors. Changing infobox parameter values from inline text using br tags to div-based text can cause div tags to be wrapped by span tags, which is a type of high-priority Linter error that we havecompletely cleared from Wikipedia; there were over 160,000 such errors at this time in 2018. The issue can sometimes be fixed by modifying the infobox to use div tags as wrappers, but not always, IIRC. –Jonesey95 (talk)12:09, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Replacing Reports bot for WikiProject membership maintenance
I've been wanted to welcome new members inWP:WikiProject Medicine and ask them to join anew campaign. Unfortunately, since April,User:Harej'sUser:Reports bot has stopped updating the membership list (adding new users who've created a{{WikiProjectCard}} and moving inactive members to an inactive members page). Women in Red use the same system, as well as as a few smaller WikiProjects. Anybody have time to fork / rewrite that task?—Femke 🐦 (talk)13:16, 24 November 2025 (UTC)
Oh, please just let me know next time this happens. Sorry, I don't keep a close eye on it, but I can fix it when things break. I didn't realize this hadn't been working for so long. In this case it was a database schema change breaking a query. I've fixed that and the task appears to be running again. — The Earwig (talk)05:13, 25 November 2025 (UTC)
{{BOTREQ}} The issue has been resolved by botop The Earwig. Couldn't find a better response template to mark as resolved. —usernamekiran(talk)22:27, 3 December 2025 (UTC)
Regularly update social media statistics
So I'm currently working on{{Infobox social media personality}}. Had a thought for a bot. Basically there is a need to keep the viewer/follower/subscriber counts up to date to avoidWP:ASOF issues. Seems like prime duty for a weekly or monthly bot? YouTube certainly has anAPI.Documentation here shows you can get viewer and subscriber counts fairly easily. I'm sure Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, etc. have something similar. Anyway, I'm not doing bot work at present but if anyone was interested in taking this on I'd be happy to collaborate! --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing)23:17, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
@Pppery: all I will say is that in the discussions relating to the merge of the various social media templates{{infobox TikTok personality}},{{Infobox Instagram personality}} etc that occurred atthis TFD and in the discussions onTemplate talk:Infobox social media personality, there was overwhelming support for keeping these statistics. There was a lot removed (such as the youtube creator awards, associated acts, and a few other things. But viewer/follower/subscriber count was deemed an important metric forWP:NOTABILITY. Personally I could go either way.WP:CONSENSUS seems to be to keep it and IF it is going to stay, I think it is important to keep it up to date. You mention order of magnitude... I am in favor of a less specific number (i.e. 320 million vs 320,432,584) which I think is inline with what you mean by order of magnitude. In any case, if you feel strongly about removing them, please join the discussion on the talk page.Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing)05:05, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
So that is totally valid. If the bot is just updating "300 million" to "304 million", then I totally agree not worth it. But as I've done these conversions I've come across pages that haven't had their stats updated in years. I spot checked a few out of curiousity, some haven't changed much, but some have wild fluctuations that do fall into the orders of magnitude.
I certainly don't envision this as a daily run bot, or even a weekly run. Maybe a monthly or even quarterly?
Is there any policy I'm missing that would make this an unacceptable bot or is your argument more of a "not worth the time and effort". Both are valid, just want to make sure I understand.Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing)08:10, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Funny story, I just stumbled acrossModule:YouTubeSubscribers which, at first glance, appears to do just that! I will say that still runs into the same problem of data getting stale. A bot would poll the API for YouTube, Instagram, etc. Pulling from Wikidata still relies on someone manually updating the stats, it just is manually updated on Wikidata instead of on Wikipedia.Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing)08:59, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Zackmann08, to be clear, repetitively updating stats edits would be more acceptable on Wikidata than on Wikipedia; there's no issues with clogging up edit history. — Qwerfjkltalk09:11, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
I've said this before elsewhere, but if there is going to be a bot-related set of updates, it should be to a single module storing subscriber counts that{{Infobox social media personality}} calls; it would be one edit per week/month/quarter but would still allow for more accurate updating of any page calling it.Primefac (talk)20:36, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
The rules that create this error seem straightforward enough to also automatically fix with a couple regex tests. Citation Bot catches some but not all of them, but since there's currently 40k+ instances of this error, waiting for a human to ask Citation Bot to check seems like a waste of time. ~ฅ(ↀωↀ=)neko-channyan16:38, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
Not anerror category. cs1|2 adds this category and emits amaintenance message when it detects a value in a{{cite journal}}|page(s)= parameter that is probably an article-number. cs1|2maintenance messages are hidden from everyone who has not enabled maintenance message display; seeHelp:CS1 errors § Controlling error message display. A{{cite journal}} template using|page= renders with a colon (:) preceding the page number; a template using|article-number= omits the colon.
Because the removal of a colon is more-or-less unnoticeable and becausemaintenance messages are hidden by default, I suspect that editors are likely to view such edits asWP:COSMETICBOT edits and demand that the bot be shut down.
WP:COSMETICBOT is a clear line, the colon is sufficient. And the removal of the maintenance categories would fall under the "administration of the encyclopedia" bullet too. OTOH, just because it's notWP:COSMETICBOT doesn't mean that a bot to do it would automatically be allowed, just like it's possible that a bot can be approved for cosmetic edits if the community supports those edits.Anomie⚔15:05, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Changes that are typically considered substantive affect something visible to readers and consumers of Wikipedia, such as
the output text or HTML in ways that make a difference to the audio or visual rendering of a page in web browsers, screen readers, when printed, in PDFs, or when accessed through other forms of assistive technology (e.g. removing a deleted category, updating a template parameter, removing blank lines from lists formatted in wikicode);
We are not arguing about whether or not you should have done the edit, the edit was correct. As are millions of other edits on Wikipedia. We do not need a discussion about this specific edit.Headbomb {t ·c ·p ·b}11:43, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
I don't follow the double negatives above, but I suspect that this blanket task would run afoul of CONTEXTBOT. Some instances of ;Notes should probably be converted to ==Notes== or ===Notes===. Some should not be touched. In your search link above, the fourth result for me isSeattle, which appears to use ;Notes properly:
;Notes:{{note label|SoundersAge|A}}Originally founded in 1974, the MLS version of the Sounders franchise was legally re-incorporated in 2007 and entered the league for the 2009 season.
Some instances of ;Notes should probably be converted to ==Notes== or ===Notes=== - I don't think that would be possible, unfortunately.which appears to use ;Notes properly: - well,;Notes: and
Imagine you have a 3rd-level heading for a section with;Notes in it and a 2nd-level heading before this section. What level would you give to;Notes if that's the only information you know?sapphaline (talk)17:43, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
It sounds like you are agreeing that this task, as proposed, is not a good task for a bot. If you can narrow your scope and show how to find articles that can be fixed without errors, and how to fix them, you might have a good bot task. –Jonesey95 (talk)19:01, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Doing a regex to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, is probably a safer path. I recommend coming up with a proposal that restricts this replacement to a specific regex, like the very common ;Notes followed by{{notelist}} or{{reflist}}, and to a specific namespace, such as article space. Then find a place, like a MOS talk page, to get consensus for the bot task. –Jonesey95 (talk)20:14, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
the very common ;Notes followed by{{notelist}} or{{reflist}} - uhhhh...
I see no consensus fora bot to make changes there. It's not enough that someone wrote "do not" in a MOS page, for a bot run we need to be confident that the task is clear enough that the bot won't be making a lot of errors and has support for a bot editing 20k articles to fix it.Anomie⚔00:48, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
It appears that the proposed simpified regexes above would, in some or all cases, add a second line break where there is already a line break, causing undesirable vertical whitespace. I don't think this proposal is being considered well enough. –Jonesey95 (talk)15:01, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
That's just a matter of tweaking the regex. The first \n in the replace with can just be omitted. And the whole thing can be made more efficient with;\s*Notes\s*\n\{\{(reflist|notelist) replace'''Notes'''\n{{$1Headbomb {t ·c ·p ·b}15:15, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
Bots don't have to just use regular expressions. They can parse the wikitext and store context regarding what heading is appropriate.isaacl (talk)16:27, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
I don't agree that example is a true description list. The following description detail items aren't describing the description term ("Notes").isaacl (talk)16:30, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
People tend to have fairly ingrained habits about these things, and may not think immediately of searching for "Public transport in Tallinn" if they usually think of it as "public transit" (as I do). Annoyingly,the search results for "Public transit in Tallinn" include the desired article,Public transport in Tallinn in fifth place.
Hence, I'm requesting that a bot go in a create the necessary redirects – for an article beginning with "Public transit inx", a redirect tagged with{{r from alternative name}} should be created at the title "Public transport inx" and vice-versa. Some of theses redirects may already exist, but in general they seem rare. Thank-you.Cremastra (talk·contribs)20:33, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
Create and maintain a page that shows the top Wikipedia pages by views and edits
I'd be interested in a few separate Wikipedia lists that are maintained by a bot once every 24 hours. I will go into detail on which each list should do.
The first list should include the most viewed pages. While I understand that pages with the most viewed articles exist, I would like to see a bot-maintained list that includes pages not in mainspace. I would like to know what the top viewed pages are that are not articles but seems to be very limited information on this. If you go into the page information section of this page, the area of the page I'm focused on isPage views in the past 30 days. If someone can figure this out, that would be great.
In the edit history section of the page, I would like to see the top articles byTotal number of edits,Recent number of edits (within past 30 days), as well asRecent number of distinct authors. The information on this is very limited outside of article pages, but I would like to see a maintained list of this.
The reason why I would like a bot to analyze these things is because I would like to analyze not only article traffic, but also pages that are not articles like in Projectspace and the Talk pages so that when I make changes to Wikipedia, since it is built for readers and to a lesser extent, editors it would be good to see how traffic like on the Teahouse compares to other pages. Please ping me when done. Thank you.Interstellarity (talk)21:16, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
Yes, I was aware of that page, but I didn't think about that when making the request. I think we are good on the total number of edits, so no need to create a new bot for that. It's just the other stuff I'm asking about.Interstellarity (talk)22:01, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
How do you expect this to be done? Bots are not human and cannot determine whether an article falls under this task force or not. Is there a category that could be used for a bot to follow, or a list of articles compiled by the task force to tag?Tenshi! (Talk page)11:49, 12 December 2025 (UTC)
Not sure about that, there's almost 5000 pages in those two categories combined (not checked for duplicates), that seems like something AWBREQ would forward here.Tenshi! (Talk page)12:38, 12 December 2025 (UTC)
Indeed, that category has around 1,000 entries. Whilst I get the need to tag all these pages, unless we know we aren't going to tag the wrong articles, a bot isn't really suitable.Lee Vilenski(talk •contribs)12:52, 12 December 2025 (UTC)
Indeed, that category has around 1,000 entries. Whilst I get the need to tag all these pages, unless we know we aren't going to tag the wrong articles, a bot isn't really suitable.Lee Vilenski(talk •contribs)12:56, 12 December 2025 (UTC)
We've had bots do it in the past. There's evena category for them, although I don't know how many are still active. I stopped having AnomieBOT do it after no one asked for years and the WikiProject banner system changed enough that I wasn't confident the bot's tagging would still be procedurally correct.Anomie⚔13:09, 12 December 2025 (UTC)
A few minutes ago, other users were suggesting adding a request to AutoWikiBrowser users. What is the best procedure for this particular task?Manick22 (talk)13:15, 12 December 2025 (UTC)
WP:CAT#T states[t]emplates are not articles and thus do not belong incontent categories. They should, however, be placed intemplate categories – subcategories ofCategory:Wikipedia templates – to assist when looking for templates of a certain type. However, templates and template categories end up in content categories. Would it be possible for a bot to look if a parent category is without{{template category}} and remove these out-of-guidelines linkings from the templates and template categories? Cases where the template or template category would end up without parents might instead be reported in a specific page. Some cases may be through the /doc and if they cannot be fixed, they may also instead be reported.
The idea makes sense - however, the bot wholesale removing a template from a content category and taking no further steps may not always be useful. The bot doesn't really have a way of knowing a more appropriate category for the template to be in, so I suppose it edits would have to be supervised? I will file a BRFA if anyone has any workarounds.WikiMacaroonsCinnamon?18:45, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
We need numbers before we start thinking about BRFA. If there are not that many they can (and probably should) be done by hand or AWB.Primefac (talk)23:39, 10 November 2025 (UTC)
It would be interesting to see a list of navboxes categorizedsolely in content categories, if that is possible, while I shudder to think how many of those cases there might be.DB1729talk04:18, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
Commenting because I was summoned. TBH I mostly only work with template-in-category stuff when (a) the template is filed in or generating aredlinked category, or (b) the template is erroneously transcluding content categories onto the articles and drafts and such because a category that should have been wrapped in noinclude tags wasn't — I rarely get involved directly in the question of where templates should or shouldn't themselves be categorized in their own right, and in fact it's literally only a few weeks ago that I even learned that templates being categorized is a standard expectation now and not just a strictly optional choice as it used to be. So I don't know that I really have much to contribute here, because the issues where I do wander into templatespace aren't really what's being talked about here.
But yeah, I would be a little bit concerned about the potential flood of templates into the uncategorized pages maintenance queue, though I imagine there could be ways to mitigate that, perhaps by having a bot work in carefully managed batches whose replacement template categories can be reasonably inferred from the template's type and purpose? I don't know if that's actually feasible, as I rarely work with bot programming either, but I'm sure that it's possible in theory. But since I did get pinged, I didn't want to just completely ignore the discussion even though I don't have any brilliant input.Bearcat (talk)14:33, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for the input! I cannot come up with a scan that lists all or a subset of the templates as linking may be directly or through categories or categories parents. I see them here and there, more frequently in football-related categories. I will start with AWB and see if I can learn better rules to facilitate cases such asthis one (788 categories) and come back if I find something that can truly be bot work.Kaffet i halsen (talk)20:07, 13 November 2025 (UTC)
Bot to count Twitter/X citations with August dates
a bot that uses the MediaWiki API to 1) find all pages linking to '*.twitter.com' and '*.x.com/*', 2) fetch the content of each page, 3) use regular expressions to find citations that contain a Twitter/X link and a date in 'August' (e.g., 'August 5', '12 August'), 4) aggregate a count for each day of August (1-31), and 5) post the daily counts as a response.~2025-32995-36 (talk)15:19, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
Hi, I'm organizing the 2026WikiCup and would like to know if it is possible to code a bot that can help out with setting up WikiCup contestants' submission pages. Specifically, automating the following tasks:
Blank allWikipedia:WikiCup/History/2026/Submissions/Username-style subpages at the start of each round and replace it with the setup template, changing the level-2 heading to reflect what round it currently is. The start dates for each round are listed atWikipedia:WikiCup. For example, round 1 begins on January 1, round 2 begins on March 1, etc.
User:LivingBot (maintained by @Jarry1250) already records WikiCup scores, but WikiCup judges still have to create the users' submission pages manually. If this is feasible, the bot would have to run from January 1 to October 31 of each year, but the trial should preferably take place before January 1, 2026 (or wait until after that date). –Epicgenius (talk)17:03, 21 December 2025 (UTC)
In addition to the above community decision that this template isn't wanted on pages, in most of these (or all?), the substitution was complete broken and left code on pages. It also left categories, one which was deleted (Category:Blocked historical users) and another which is heading that way (Category:Indefinitely blocked IP addresses). Since these pages will be need edits to remove these deleted categories, it would be best to just complete the TfD result and remove this template code completely from these pages.
Coding...Tenshi! (Talk page)16:41, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
BRFAfiledTenshi! (Talk page)17:33, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
-Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing)21:47, 11 November 2025 (UTC)
Done throughWikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Monkbot 21.Headbomb {t ·c ·p ·b}11:40, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Partly done The other ones are mildly covered by other bots or not a conventional database report so I didn't do them.