User talk:Tokenzero/Archive 1

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To be done in the same manner

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:24, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

The bot seems to have chocked / needs a kick in the bucket of bolts to get restarted. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:39, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
@Headbomb: Actually I paused the bot yesterday when I realized the number of redirects created, to discuss it today. The number at this moment is about 20k pages created (of which 20% are talk pages). With the further lists here, this is more than the total number of redirects created otherwise in all of (English) Wikipedia within a month (~37k), and it is getting close to 1% of all existing redirects (stats). By itself it's not a technical problem and not a big maintenance problem either (though the ISO-4 category and the list of redirects in WP:JOURNALS are useless for humans now). But I'd like to at least understand if all of these are really necessary.
I mean what are the goals? Is it to make them reachable when typing the title? If so, I would vote to skip the and/ampersand variants and dotless variants, as Search will find them easily. Is it to have some other bot work based on redirect data? Then maybe that data could be provided directly. To be clear, I'm not objecting, just asking, maybe what I need to find peace :) is just some documentation of how WP:CRAPWATCH works (like does it use redirects?) and how it is supposed to be used (like editors sifting through the list, or getting notified when adding/editing/viewing a dubious citation?), because that's a bit unclear to me now. Tokenzero (talk) 17:18, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
The objectives are twofold, the first is if someone searches for/links to Open Journal of Crap & Foo, there is a reasonable target at the end of it. That's the 'encyclopedic' benefit of it. The second is that it hugely facilitates what WP:JCW does. It looks for things that links to the same place, variants of those links, and typos of those links. Having say Open Journal of Crap / Open J. Crap / Open J Crap existing means they won't show up as potential typos of say Open Journal of the CRA / Open J. CRA / Open J CRA. And they'll also show up in things like [1] (search for 'Journals cited by Wikipedia).Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:47, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
Talk page tagging though, is pretty pointless. As far as I'm concerned, all abbreviations/ISO 4/NLM/MathSciNet/Bluebook redirects could be de-tagged without any loss.Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:03, 17 October 2018 (UTC)
OK, now that I read the updated Questionable1 list, I see people use those dotless and ampersand variants much more that I thought, for the 'encyclopedic' side. On the other hand, from the 5000 titles and variants in the search you gave, only 2 are actually cited, apparently. I don't see any variants ever used as links, and as for Search as I said it handles variants well anyway. For JCW the bot could in principle just read, say, subpages of User:JL-Bot/Questionable.cfg that I could fill with lists of titles and abbrevs, one for each publisher. I don't see the value of WhatLinksHere, since the same is much better presented by the JCW lists. The red-blue distinction in links in JCW could be easily simulated, and I don't see links outside of WP:JCW. But I guess there is some value to making individual redirects, because e.g. when editors handle some abbreviation collision between a crap and non-crap journal as usual, their decision is automatically used by JL-Bot too.
So I'm continuing the bot run. But if you plan to increase the numbers more than 10× then I would seriously consider doing subpages of JL-Bot instead, or creating only redirects for variants that ever appeared in JCW. (As for talk pages, I only create them for the main, unabbreviated variant now, since at least the beginning of this task; that's why they make 20% and not 50%). Tokenzero (talk) 10:36, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
For that link, 3 were cited (as created by TokenzeroBot). Part of the point for the bot run is that we don't know what variants exist (and those are still all likely search terms). For instance, there could be a lot of Open journal of crap, or Open J Crap., or even a Open Journal of Crap: Official Journal of the Crap Society and those aren't picked up because we need a new dump before they shows up.
Could we set these up as subpages of /JL-Bot? Theoretically yes, but that would require new code, and would be less efficient at reducing false positives for other similarly named journals. And we'd lack the encyclopedic benefits for the reader too. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:31, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

You could omit all redirect talk page tagging if you want. I think it was User:Randykitty who requested that, likely out of misunderstanding of how WP:AALERTS work. I can't think of any benefit to that tagging, and multiple drawbacks. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:34, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

More redirects

Some ISO 4 abbreviations have widespread non-ISO 4 variants

ISO 4 Variant Count[1]
Adm. Admin. 40
Animal Anim. 128
Am. Amer. 1386[2]
Atmospheric Atmos. 32
Br. Brit. 780[2]
Calif. Cal. 13
Commun. Comm. 136
Contributions Contrib. ?
Entomol. Ent. 58
Investig. Invest. 26
Lond. London 11
Philos. Phil. 69
Political Polit. 80
Radiat. Rad. 11
Royal Roy. 80
Royal R. 80
Special Spec. ?
  1. ^ Out of 25,000. Multiply by ~1.5 to get an estimate based on all 37,085 abbreviations that exist at the moment.
  2. ^ a b Excluding the predatory ones that redirect to categories would bring that down a lot

If the bot could crawl Category:Redirects from ISO 4 abbreviations, find something like J. Royal Soc. Entomol. Lond. (let's assume this exists), and then create all variants

  • J. Royal Soc. Entomol. London
  • J. Roy. Soc. Entomol. London
  • J. R. Soc. Entomol. London
  • J. Royal Soc. Ent. London
  • J. Roy. Soc. Ent. London
  • J. R. Soc. Ent. London
  • J. Royal Soc. Entomol. Lond. (← the original ISO 4 redirect)
  • J. Roy. Soc. Entomol. Lond.
  • J. R. Soc. Entomol. Lond.
  • J. Royal Soc. Ent. Lond.
  • J. Roy. Soc. Ent. Lond.
  • J. R. Soc. Ent. Lond.

(plus dotless ones), and tag them with {{R from abbreviation}}, that would be great. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:22, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Sorry, I believe this would make way too many redirects. As I told you before, increasing the number of created redirects by another number of magnitude really makes it ridiculously close to the total number of other redirects. I also don't see enough benefit for user searches from adding artificially constructed abbrevs, and it is a legitimate concern that some searches are actually spammed by them. As for crapwatch, it is easier to just do this kind of replacement inside the bot, since making them in the mainspace requires graceful handling of all kinds of corner cases (dots in titles, existing pages, two titles having the same abbrevs, etc.). Tokenzero (talk) 20:45, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
@Tokenzero: these are not "artificially constructed", those are actually all used in the wild (and this isn't crapwatch related). For instance Proc. Ent. Soc. Wash. is way more popular out in the real world than the ISO 4 abbreviation Proc. Entomol. Soc. Wash. (see WP:JCW/P34). I've been creating those by hand so far when I encounter them, but it's very tedious to do so. We're talking in the ballpark of 2000 redirects (many of which would already be created), if we exclude the predatory ones. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:56, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
I actually suspect most those those date back to a previous version of the ISO 4 standards, or something ISO 4 ish, like using R. instead of Royal in English abbreviations, since Royal is abbreviated R. in non-English. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:59, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
Ok, those numbers aren't half as bad as I thought they would be. I would however add some maintenance category to them other than just {{R from abbreviation}}. Tokenzero (talk) 23:15, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
What would be the maintenance category? What more than {{R from abbreviation}} is needed (save for {{R from NLM}}/{{R from MathSciNet}} which will occasionally apply to some of those)? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:20, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
Say Category:Redirects from non-standard journal abbreviation? Anything to make them easy to quantify and, should there ever be a consensus to delete them, make that easy as well.
By the way, I'm looking into handling bot mismatches en masse (supervised) – what should we do with existing redirects from abbrevs that people marked as ISO-4, but are in fact wrong? Remove {{R from ISO 4 abbreviation}} and add Category:Redirects from non-standard journal abbreviation or mark them for speedy deletion with WP:G6 or WP:R3? Tokenzero (talk) 13:20, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Well, non-standard is problematic. They could very well be standard in a field. E.g. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. is pretty standard in astronomy much like Proc. Ent. Soc. Wash. seems to be pretty standard in entomology, even if it's those are not modern ISO 4 abbreviations. It could also be a NLM abbreviation, or a MathSciNet abbreviation, or one of many different standards out there. The only thing you can safely say about them is that they are abbreviations. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:31, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
And what I do for the second one is remove {{R from ISO 4}} and replace with {{R from abbreviation}}. Sometimes {{R from typo}} if it's a typo'd abbreviation, like Proc. Ento Soc. Washington Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:33, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Non-standard as in not covered by any actual written standard or database (ISO-4, NLM, MathSciNet). Tokenzero (talk) 13:42, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
Well, that's the thing. It's pretty hard to know before hand if those are covered by a written standard or not. Especially for older versions of the ISO 4 standard, or standards that may exist in print only. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:45, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Done (under the umbrella TokenzeroBot 6 BRFA, though I know it's a bit of a stretch). 2387 new redirects (out of ~14,000 in Category:Redirects from abbreviations, for comparison; I did not put them in any category, just {{R from abbreviation}}). I avoided ISO-4 redirects that redirect to a category. By the way, I checked some haphazard subset and indeed >75% of those created redirects gave hundreds or more google search results. Tokenzero (talk) 19:22, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Thanks a boatload! Like I said, they are relatively common, oftentimes more than the modern ISO 4 ones, although exception can always happen. And right before the April 1st dump too! This is likely something that should run one day before each dump (1st and 20th of each month, so running on last day of the month, and 19th should be good.) Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:29, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
@Headbomb: Ok, this (as well as the other bots) should now run more regularly, 19th and last day of each month. Tokenzero (talk) 12:09, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

The first exists, but the second one doesn't. Is there any reason why the bot doesn't create the second one? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:16, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

The andBot only looks for pages with infobox journals, not redirects to them (though redirects created by my other bots do the same 'and/ampersand' duplication). I suppose you'd like it to look for all redirects (to journals), I'll look into that. Tokenzero (talk) 12:21, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
This could be safely extended to {{infobox magazine}} and magazines as well. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:00, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
@Tokenzero: any updates on this? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:25, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
@Headbomb: This would create <2534 redirects (for journals and magazines, after filtering out those '& → and' cases that might not be English). Tested 10: contribs. Should I run it all? Tokenzero (talk) 21:00, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

They all look good to me. I say go for it. Shame it didn't get done before the dump but at least it will be ready for the next one. What about from & to and? Too risky? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:18, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Done. Most '&' to 'and' are done, the number of remaining titles that 'might not be English' according to the bot is 234: Tokenzero (talk) 12:23, 26 May 2019 (UTC)
Extended content

Are those the ones it didn't touch, or the ones it did? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:29, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

The ones it didn't touch. I changed the list so now it displays the 'and' variant, since it already exists anyway in many cases (the '&' variant exists for all of these). Tokenzero (talk) 18:30, 26 May 2019 (UTC)