Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WebCiteBOT 2

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Speedily Approved.

WebCiteBOT 2

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Operator: ThaddeusB

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic

Programming language(s): Perl

Source code available: not yet, but it won't be substantially different than the original code

Function overview: Add archive links to all pages that point to a specific website.

Edit period(s): as needed

Estimated number of pages affected: 30000 in first run, variable amounts in subsequent runs

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): N

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

Function details: This is a minor extension of the existing WebCiteBOT functionality to address websites that known to be closing at a future date. The first run will be to archive all GeoCities.com links, as Yahoo is closing it down later this month. This task varies from the original functionality in a few ways:

1. It seeks out all pages that already link to a specific website rather than only archiving newly added links.
2. It will archive all links (i.e. including "External Links") rather than just references. I am making it do this because 1) sometimes references are mistakenly placed in the EL section; 2) there is no current guidance of whether archived "official homepage" links are good or bad; 3) Once the site is gone, the info will be lost. Thus it is much easier to remove the archived external link at a later date if deemed undesirable than it is to recover the info later.
3. A couple minor things like not setting accessdate

Discussion

• I am leaning towards speedy approving this due to the timeframe nature of the task. Unless there is an exceptional objection, I will approve it when I wake up in 7 hours. MBisanz ^talk 05:00, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
  • I'm inclined to agree: we don't have much time to waste here, ThaddeusB has proven to be a responsible bot operator, and this is really a minor variation on an existing task. A WP:VPR (or other appropriate location) post asking about the External Links question would be a good idea, though; if the community consensus goes against EL archiving, that particular feature should be easy to turn off. Anomie⚔ 11:16, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.