User talk:GreenC bot/Archive 2

You can stop the bot by pushing the stop button. The bot sees and immediately stops running. Unless it is an emergency please consider reporting problems first to my talk page.

My Fave Wiki Guy[edit]

	My Fave Wiki Guy
	I love Bots! Craigevans2 (talk) 23:03, 10 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. -- GreenC 23:31, 10 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

GreenC bot error[edit]

The removal of the double braces in this edit by GreenC bot seems to be an error. With the double braces in place the template displays a properly formatted (and correct) equation. Without them, it does not display correctly.
David Wilson (talk · cont) 19:38, 11 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bot fixed. I'll go back and find other cases. Thanks. -- GreenC 19:50, 11 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bot error[edit]

In this edit [1] the bot failed to honour the dmy template. Please shut the bot down until this problem is corrected. Hawkeye7 (talk) 01:12, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah forgot to match for "yes" not just "y". It's fixed but checking already done cases now. -- GreenC 03:20, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Found and fixed about 670 cases. More info at Special:PermaLink/749415268#Bot_mistake_help. For anyone else interested, if you see Fluxbot and GreenC bot what looks like a war - that's the fix (rollback and redo) -- GreenC 05:58, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Please check edits, this one reintroduced the edit you had me rollback: Tatuí. — xaosflux ^Talk 06:08, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Viroaga River as well. — xaosflux ^Talk 06:09, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- @Green Cardamom: — xaosflux ^Talk 06:10, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. Probably this is because I patched the bot while the bot was still processing a batch, so the edits for some in that batch were originally correct. But I played it safe and listed everything that might have been effected. -- GreenC 06:19, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oooo, well I suppose what is important is that the page is correct now. — xaosflux ^Talk 06:22, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It worked out :) -- GreenC 06:28, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

GreenC bot[edit]

The bot is using the wrong date format in many articles. Example: Green Party of Canada Me-123567-Me (talk) 17:43, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The output of the new template is exactly the same as the former template. The bot has no way of knowinf that isn't what you wanted. Whoever added the old template didn't use the |df=y argument in {{wayback}} which tells it to display DMY. When there is no |df= then {{wayback}} defaults to MDY. -- GreenC 17:47, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

BTW this was a problem generally with {{wayback}}, it hid the date format from editors, bots and tools, it was only visible in the rendered output (or if you knew the syntax of the template in the wikisource). The new WYSIWYG format of {{webarchive}} is easier to work with and less error prone. -- GreenC 18:02, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It should honour the {{dmy}} or {{mdy}} templates, if present. Hawkeye7 (talk) 21:45, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I understand and I considered it when writing the bot, the problem is the bot doesn't know why someone configured {{wayback}} so it honors the per-existing configuration when making the merger. It might expose a problem that was already there, but it's not causing new breakage. But then again it might cause new breakage changing the date format. Suggest if a date format changer bot is wanted that is a different project and BRFA cycle. -- GreenC 22:27, 14 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's not up to us to code a bot to fix dates. If your bot is going to break formats, then it should be disallowed. Me-123567-Me (talk) 21:35, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. It should. Me-123567-Me (talk) 21:35, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Hawkeye - looks like it needs fixing. Hchc2009 (talk) 22:00, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Bot_owners'_noticeboard#.7B.7Bwebarchive.7D.7D_merge -- GreenC 22:29, 15 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This change leads to a black page, with words saying, site coming soon.[edit]

This change by GreenC bot seems not to have found a page with any useful information related to the topic of the article. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Master_and_Commander:_The_Far_Side_of_the_World&diff=750338005&oldid=750090248 which is a change to External Links for the movie, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World on November 19, 2016. The original link points to current movies by that producer, so an archived version of the page is needed, but a version with some content. Can that be found? --Prairieplant (talk) 23:15, 19 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Prairieplant, Wayback doesn't always work with Flash sites particularly old ones. I checked Webcitation.org and Archive.is and they don't have it. Maybe Wayback will fix it someday, or contact them to see if they can. -- GreenC 02:48, 20 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the reply Green Cardamom. So you figure the page has something to show, but it does not show because of the way Flash was used on the page, and that falls in the province of Wayback, to read all versions of old pages. One can communicate with Wayback? Always something new to learn with Wikipedia. I have no clue how to do that. --Prairieplant (talk) 22:00, 20 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Prairieplant, maybe Contact .. in the past I've found they don't always reply due to shortage of staff, but wouldn't hurt to try. Also the forums not sure which is best for wayback. -- GreenC 14:25, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Weird[edit]

This was possibly raised and already addressed. Anyway, have a look here [2]. Materialscientist (talk) 00:23, 20 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, this is new, but I know what caused it and how to fix. I checked the rest and this was the only case. -- GreenC 02:44, 20 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

More Weird[edit]

The nice bot seems to have introduced a formatting error to the infobox at Sumba, but I can't work out how or why! Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 08:56, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cancel that. I'm now at home looking on a different browser (both Safari and Firefox for Mac) and it looks fine. Now that is weird. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 13:25, 22 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Apparent bot error[edit]

In the article RSX-11 GreenC bot appears to have made this [edit]. I can't speak to the web archive portion of the edit, but the "...process control computer..." deletion may indicate a bug in the bot. I'm fixing the article myself, but I thought you would like to know about this apparent bug. Cheers Overjive (talk) 01:07, 15 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi[edit]

Will the bot continue its work of adding Webarchive links to articles? I found that really helpful. Cheers.--BabbaQ (talk) 01:10, 27 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Periodically once a month or so. -- GreenC 01:58, 27 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

web.archive.org[edit]

[3] [4] the Internet Archive links work... SpiderMum (talk) 22:40, 18 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

SpiderMum, none of those links work:

-- GreenC 23:02, 18 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also, please don't do this. It's not your personal post to delete. -- GreenC 23:04, 18 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

2. and 3. are in Wayback template, with archive IDs / numbers SpiderMum (talk) 23:21, 18 January 2017 (UTC) ad 1.: Sometimes it takes a couple of tries to get to the archived page (instead of the "robots.txt" message ) SpiderMum (talk) 23:33, 18 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

{{wayback}} will be deleted in a few weeks and is no not supported, please use {{cite web}}. The links 2 & 3 are blocked by robots but if you want to keep them that is ok. -- GreenC 00:12, 19 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Removing archive links[edit]

What's the reasoning behind this edit? --Mhhossein ^talk 17:20, 7 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Duplicate {{webarchive}} templates (see rest of cite). Caused during the merger of {{wayback}} to {{webarchive}} due to unforeseen interactions between GreenC bot and User:InternetArchiveBot. GreenC bot is going back and removing the dups. -- GreenC 17:29, 7 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In this case the dups were caused by something else but anyway there are a couple ways dups get added so GreenC bot checks for them. -- GreenC 18:41, 7 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Weird edit[edit]

A weird edit. Not even sure what task the bot is doing. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 15:57, 18 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah I saw it and fixed it about an hour after. Sometimes archive.is URLs are incorrectly encoded and need to be re-encoded, or in this case unencoded, except when they require encoding - archive.is has no encoding 'system' only what works for that particular URL. It's Fix #21. -- GreenC 16:10, 18 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Whoops, I didn't notice you fixed it. Just clicked some random links in bot's contribs. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK 16:20, 18 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Missed end braces.[edit]

I found an old edit (diff) where end braces should have been removed (ie. both "{{urlencode:" and "}}"). I hope you have fixed this. Regards. – Allen4names (contributions) 00:50, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It removed the "{{urlencode:" part incidentally when it replaced the non-working URL, a happy coincidence. The closing braces were added by yourself what looks like a 1-time mistake, it won't check for those. -- GreenC 01:31, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't (and don't) have any problems with the URLs I added. I used the {{urlencode:}} magic word because that part of URLs is a query string and should be encoded accordingly in the unlikely event it should be required. – Allen4names (contributions) 01:55, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Oh I see what happened. Couple things: the "=" should be url encoded (ie. percent encoding) not HTML encoded. The HTML encoding will work in browsers because the HTML engine will translate but break with non-interactive things like bots that don't have HTML engines. It's technically correct per RfC the query should be encoded. In my experience with archiving sites the correct solution is whatever is in their database when the snapshot was taken, the encoding used at the time. Sometimes they can translate between encodings, other times not. Wayback is good at it while the smaller archive sites don't do it well, they expect more literal URLs. WebCite it doesn't matter as they ignore the url= parameter it's there for internal Wikipedia purposes to keep track of the source URL - one could use anything (or nothing) and it would still work. The magic word I've never seen before and the bot is not currently recognizing it. Should be easy to incorporate. -- GreenC 05:18, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It is getting late for me so you may want to {{Ping}} me if you want a reply but right now I am thinking about the role of the equals sign ("=") in query strings and MediaWiki templates. – Allen4names (contributions) 07:31, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Allen, after a nights rest, URI's should be URL-encoded only. They shouldn't contain other encoding schemes - HTML, templates or magic words. For example using {{!}} is broken because according to RFC#3986 the "!" is a reserved character that should be percent encoded. There's no way my bot or any bot can decode multiple different schemes when it doesn't know if the characters are supposed to be literal or encoded. Likewise when using magic words, what happens when the URL is copied to another non-wiki site, they won't have a Wikipedia magic-word decoding engine. There is a single universal encoding scheme for URLs: percent encoding. -- GreenC 15:06, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Substitution should work. For example {{subst:urlencode:https://www.example.org/}} converts to https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.org%2F. Any other concerns? – Allen4names (contributions) 20:11, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Allen, the URL standalone doesn't work because the leading slashes shouldn't be encoded. If it was part of the query string the "{{subst:" becomes a literal part of the URL when used outside of Wikipedia rendering engines, such as by bots or any other application that sources the URL from the wikitext. -- GreenC 20:58, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think there is some miscommunication here so I will reformat the above example as a query string before and after conversion by the MediaWiki software.

?url={{subst:urlencode:https://www.example.org/}} (before substitution)
?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.org%2F (after substitution)

Please note that the post conversion wikitext does not contain "{{subst:" (I used a <nowiki/> tag to prevent conversion). – Allen4names (contributions) 21:17, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes sorry I forgot subst is 1-time; subst:urlencode does work nicely and appears to be a good solution vs. typing out the percent characters. -- GreenC 21:38, 19 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

navbox[edit]

Hi, i work on a navbox for ways of obtaining science in two related field, scientific method from philosophy of science and dikw pyramid from information science. i need help of some people like you to finsh this,

you can see a prototype of navbox in my sand box: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:KPU0/sandbox Plutonium 16:40, 21 February 2017 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by KPU0 (talk • contribs)

Broken URL[edit]

In this diff GreenC bot managed to break the first of the four URLs it was trying to fix. I repaired it, and I haven’t seen any other occurrence of it, but you might still want to look at it – I can’t see how it managed to get that one wrong.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 19:50, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Bug in WM caused by a new feature to include the scheme in source URLs, fixed. -- GreenC 21:02, 26 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Duplicated archive link[edit]

In the first ref edited here [5] the bot replaces a dead Internet Archive link with a live link to WebCite... normally no problem, but in this case it is a duplicate of the other archive url already used in the citation. It seems rather pointless to have [url]...[archive url]...[same archive url] in the reference. The bot obviously knows that duplicated archive links might as well be removed when it comes across such situations (see second ref edited in the diff), but seemingly not when it causes that situation. - Evad37 [talk] 23:43, 15 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it works in a procedural fashion. The function for duplicates comes before the dead link replacer. If/when the bot runs on the page again it would remove the duplicate. I'll think about it, probably it can rerun the duplicate remover after the dead link replacer without causing side effects. -- GreenC 00:27, 16 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Aubrey Maturin series -- one link is fixed but format generates errors on finished page[edit]

Hello, A few references were saved here https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aubrey%E2%80%93Maturin_series&diff=771877255&oldid=767934751 but one of them needs more information to be a correct citation. On the finished page it says it needs an archive date. I am not up to speed on how to fix that. I appreciate the saved citations, nonetheless. --Prairieplant (talk) 02:38, 24 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed (in the code) and Trappist fixed the page. -- GreenC 14:50, 25 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you![edit]

	The Original Barnstar
	Good User Mega Fixer Lee (talk) 03:48, 28 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Error in reformatting archive link[edit]

The bot reformatted this link, and did so incorrectly. Not only is the date it added incorrect (I was the one who created that citation, so I should know), but it added an unnecessary extra string of characters to the end of the URL. Please change the bot so it doesn't do this. Thanks! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 03:44, 1 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

User:Nihonjoe, the date is correct, WebCite uses GMT time as seen on the snapshot page (top right corner). The URL is correct, we should use long form per this RfC due to policy about web shortening, blacklised links etc.. -- GreenC 03:53, 1 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The WikiChevrons[edit]

		The WikiChevrons
		For rescuing dead links and readding them to the articles of the Military history WikiProject you are hereby awarded the WikiChevrons. Keep up the good work! TomStar81 (Talk) 06:07, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Problem edit[edit]

Hi, there is a problem with this edit in that on one of the cites it has removed the |archiveurl= and |archivedate= parameters leaving it with an invalid cite. Keith D (talk)

It's either because of the multiple |archive-url= args or the {{!}} .. or combo. I'll check and rerun the article, there is more than one error. -- GreenC 20:46, 5 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Webarchive date changed to 3 January 1970[edit]

See [6]. That date is very close to the epoch time of 1 January 1970. - Evad37 [talk] 01:34, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. It had a problem recognizing double archive URLs in certain cases and so the webcite date conversion function was getting bad data. -- GreenC 16:59, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Unexplained change to archivedate on cite on article Fløibanen[edit]

Hi.

The bot has made a rather odd change to a cite I added to the article Fløibanen. It has changed the cite's archivedate= and archiveurl= values to use a version of the cited pdf archived on 10 September 2013 rather than one archived on 12 April 2014. The edit comment was:

Rescued 1 archive link; reformat 1 link. Wayback Medic 2.1

which doesn't make any sense to me. Both archives exist and work, and I don't see how swapping one for the other can be regarded as rescuing anything. On a cursory examination, the two archives look identical, but the fact remains that the 2014 one was the source for my contributions to the WP article, and the 2013 one wasn't. It may be there are subtle changes between the two that invalidate the earlier one as a source, and without any better explanation than that above I don't propose to spend the time checking that out. Is there any reason why I shouldn't just revert your bots change?. -- chris_j_wood (talk) 15:00, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I can't replicate the edit but it looks like the wayback link redirects to an external website (kind of unusual) and at the time it was checked the external site wasn't reachable. So being unable to verify the link it fell back to using the wayback API result which had a different date. -- GreenC 16:43, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Malfunction on Athlone[edit]

On the article Athlone, there seems to have been a malfunction in this edit. --David Biddulph (talk) 21:15, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

User error. I forgot to reprocess the article before uploading, after running a test. -- GreenC 22:58, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Glad to hear that there's a simple explanation. --David Biddulph (talk) 23:17, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

This has happened before. There is an easy solution. I've updated the code so it will automatically check for and avoid this in the future. -- GreenC 23:43, 23 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of archivedate[edit]

The bot removed `archivedate=` in Special:Diff/778062515. Here it was being used for (a non-archive.org…) archive of an older 1905 work. —Sladen (talk) 04:26, 1 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

|archivedate= pairs with |archiveurl= - any other usage is 'off-label' (see template documentation) and liable to be deleted by cleanup bots like WaybackMedic. Without an |archivedate=, the |archiveurl= doesn't get displayed and serves no purpose for the template other than maybe a personal note in the wikisource. -- GreenC 14:15, 1 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Green Cardamom, thank you for the confirmation. Now that it has been flagged up, please can this behaviour be removed/disabled. —Sladen (talk) 21:02, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"flagged up"? -- GreenC 21:14, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Green Cardamom, the top of User:GreenC bot states that this account is a bot, and that issues should be raised here on the User Talk: page in preference to stopping the bot. This has been done above, and the issue has been confirmed in the reply given. Hence it has been "flagged up". The next step, as a responsible bot operator, would be to take action to avoid it being repeated. —Sladen (talk) 21:34, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You're requesting all stray |archivedate= on Wikipedia not be cleaned up (there are thousands) because you use a couple for undocumented purposes. That will require discussion at Help_talk:Citation_Style_1. The bot behaves in accordance to CS1 documentation. In the mean time if it's only a couple refs use the {{cbignore}} which will tell all link bots to bypass the ref - which has its own downsides but will keep the undocumented usage from being corrected. -- GreenC 22:37, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Buffalo Central Terminal[edit]

I see you edited our page. I am a member of the CTRC are you? We would prefer any additions to our page be cleared through the CTRC before they are added to our page. Sparky1997 (talk) 23:28, 1 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Sparky1997: Please note that no one has to clear anything through you or anyone else connected with CTRC before editing that article. It is not your article. Please review WP:COI and WP:OWN for more details. ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:02, 3 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Formatting of WebCite archive URLs[edit]

The bot keeps changing the formatting of the URLS (and the date, in some cases), and the formatting is completely unnecessary. Thnere is no need to add the "?url.thats.being.archived" to the end of the URL. It's a completely useless addition that serves no valid purpose. Please adjust the parameters of the bot to not do this. Thanks! ···日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 16:53, 3 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

We use long form on enwiki per RfC please see Wikipedia:Using_WebCite#Use_within_Wikipedia -- the new dates are correct, go to the webcite URL and you can see what the archive date is. -- GreenC 17:52, 3 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

cyclic editing[edit]

See Orenair engaged in warfare with InternetArchiveBot, I fail to see how removing archived links is helpful. Endercase (talk) 16:30, 20 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Two problems: The archive URL goes to a blank content page so it's not of any use. Second, the ref contains two copies of the same archive URL. GreenC bot is trying to remove the duplicate but IABot keeps adding it back. I'll report it to IABot but really the problem is with the ref. -- GreenC 17:03, 20 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Actually the page works by clicking Contacts. -- GreenC 17:06, 20 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cite errors[edit]

The close reference tag was removed in this edit. Another two here Regards CV9933 (talk) 16:20, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I fixed a problem earlier this morning that will also fix this. How did you find these? -- GreenC 16:28, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I was able to find 14 articles with this bug and reverted. It's possible a couple were missed but I'm missing data for part of it. -- GreenC 16:57, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The errors show up in this tracking category. Regards CV9933 (talk) 17:49, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

CV9933, excellent. Found six more, thank you. - GreenC 18:17, 24 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Duplicate ref defs caused by GreenC Bot[edit]

Hello! GreenC Bot performed this edit on the Baltimore article, causing two duplicate ref def errors. What's the appropriate way to fix this? Normally, I'd just roll back the edit because it doesn't appear to be adding any meaningful content, and instead broke a couple references on the page. -- Mikeblas (talk) 16:51, 26 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Mikeblas, the bot removed an empty |deadurl= argument. The underlying problem is duplicate named refs in the article, and a duplicate in {{Baltimore weatherbox}}, neither the bot's fault. Sometimes bots fix one problem and it exposes other problems that were always there but the bot can't detect or fix. It's a process of moving forward that isn't always complete, though not very common. The solution is to merge the duplicates once they become flagged by the ref dup detector. I fixed the other ref (page preview to see or it won't show up due the template). -- GreenC 17:46, 26 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Bot doesn't like citations from Visual Source Editor?[edit]

GreenCBot just changed two of my citations on the Malcolm Baldrige Jr. article. The first one it just stripped some attributes from the URL: |archive-url=|archive-date=|dead-url=| which are laid down by the Visual Source Editor when you create citations using it. This one is the Great Westerners citation.

The second citation it replaced a perfectly good citation thinking it was a broken link when it wasn't. And pointed it to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. This one is the ProRodeo Hall of Fame citation.

Now I know how to fix these. However, I thought you might want to look at first so I did not. I am not in a hurry, just wanted to let you know. I have had this happen before actually, and I just fixed it. But now I see it's a continuing problem. I have even had editors remove these attributes manually from my citations recently and wondered why. I mean, don't the engineers who build the Visual Source Editor have a reason for putting these attributes in there in the first place? I'm sure they don't mean them to cause problems? Perhaps you can convince me to go back to adding citations in the regular source editor or use the Refill tool. I would appreciate your advice. Thanks! dawnleelynn^(talk) 20:29, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

That's good to know Visual Editor is leaving blank archive arguments. My bot assumes those were left by other archive bots by mistake because it's not uncommon for bots to leave them in error when they are trying to save a link but something went wrong. So my bot when it sees them tries to create an archive link if the primary links is dead and otherwise removes them so it won't recheck next time around. My dead link detector is not great so it sometimes gets it wrong like this case. Maybe I need to contact the VE folks and see what they say about the blank arguments. -- GreenC 21:35, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

visual editor clutters wikitext by including the 'suggested' parameters listed in template data. Someone (not the ve engineers) decided that these three parameters (among others) should be suggested. ve is not smart enough to recognize that parameters left empty by an editor should not be included in wikitext (the blame for this falls squarely on the ve engineers). Experience shows that those who leave empty parameters in cs1|2 citations, perhaps in the (ultimately forlorn) hope that someone will provide content, are going to be disappointed. I think removal of empty parameters related to the bot's task is a proper thing to do (of course keeping in mind cosmetic bot requirement, etc).

And, @dawnleelynn, {{cite web}} is probably a better choice than {{cite news}} for the two cs1|2 template you mentioned; they are not newspapers or similar sources.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:30, 2 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Trappist the monk, thanks for the info. Opened a ticket T166928. -- GreenC 02:27, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you to both of you for your advice. I appreciate it very much. I have decided I will not use the Visual Source Editor to create citations anymore for that reason and one other. I was just discussing with my mentor Montanabw the fact that it creates citations named "0:" and numbered thereon. It can cause problems later on we have found. So, until those issues are resolved, I shall use other means. I have a technical background, so it's really no problem. The only thing that I really like the editor for mostly is for copy edits and entering data in tables and I can still do that. Thanks again gentlemen. dawnleelynn^(talk) 03:07, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Trappist the monk: @Green Cardamom: I realized that I had over 250 of these suckers in a new list article I was creating in my sandbox that was ready to go live. Since I recently got access to use AutoWikiBrowser, I created a search and replace to remove those empty parameters inserted by the VE from my article. It worked like a charm on the first try. The article is mainstream now. It's List of ProRodeo Hall of Fame inductees. I am now going to use it on all the rodeo articles that my mentor @Montanabw: and I oversee. I just tried a test on one short category, and it worked well. I'll be using the Template - Cite Web in the Source Editor window from now on to create my citations. Unless, of course the type of citation calls for another type. This will prevent anymore incidents with the bot until it is fixed. Just thought you'd like to know. dawnleelynn^(talk) 18:19, 4 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

https converted to http[edit]

...which is pretty much the opposite of what the bot is supposed to do: [7]. Plus there seems to be a bug in the counter for the edit summary, as only one link was changed. - Evad37 [talk] 01:22, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In this case http is correct and https incorrect. -- GreenC 01:30, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Can you explain why http would be preferred? - Evad37 [talk] 02:54, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Here's the link:

http://www.webcitation.org/6Xhnr4Lw0?url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110404120927/http://www.tourism.wa.gov.au/Publications%20Library/Tourist%20Drives%20of%20WA.pdf

See the top of the page. It was saved on webcite as http. The bot gets the info from webcite API and matches it up in the wikitext. It will work either way and doesn't make a difference. -- GreenC 04:08, 3 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

bot wars[edit]

Your bot appears to be competing with another bot and reverting each other. Look at the edits from May 20 to June 6 on this page: Mayabazar history Bollyjeff | talk 02:09, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. -- GreenC 14:19, 12 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]