User:CmdrObot

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This account exists as a home for a manually assisted bot not dissimilar to AutoWikiBrowser but for Mac OS X written using PyObjC. It was officially approved as a bot account in March 2006. Its owner, author, and general Lord and Master is Cmdrjameson who uses it for all sorts of nefarious purposes.

The nefarious purposes

• Correcting spellings based on a growing list of common and not so common typos. Naturally, this is prone to false positives, so it definitely needs adult supervision.
• Indulging in pedantry about the correct capitalisation and use of non-breaking spaces for the SI abbreviations for Hertz including kHz, MHz, GHz and THz.
• Removing spaces between numbers and percents, eg '50 %' should really be '50%'.^[1]
• Inserting spaces after periods at the end of a sentence and before the following word.
• Inserting spaces after commas and removing spaces before commas where appropriate.
• Removing unnecessary <br> tags at the end of items in ordered and unordered wikilists.
• Correctly capitalising the days of the week, months of the year, and common place and language names. A lot of editors whose first language isn't English don't realise that these proper nouns are capitalised in English.
• Fixing indefinite article mismatches such as 'a iBook', 'an MacBook'.
• Replacing unneeded (safe) HTML entities such as &eacute; with the equivalent UTF-8 é.
• Replacing unnecessarily percent-escaped UTF-8 in wikilinks with UTF-8.
• Compacting unnecessarily piped wikilinks such as [[Buffy_Summers|Buffy Summers]] to [[Buffy Summers]]
• Fixing broken URLs that accidentally begin with http://http:// or http:///. My first sweep found a surprising number (several hundred) of these.
• Replacing hardcoded URLs to articles in the main namespace in the English wikipedia with proper wikilinks. There were quite a lot of these when I first looked (a few thousand, I think), and more pop up all the time. They cause problems for wikipedia mirrors and break the 'what links here' machinery.
• Strip the unnecessary gunk (including referrer IDs) off Amazon and AllMusic URLs. Roughly 100 of these are added every week.
• As per a suggestion by Dismas, replace occurrences of 'U.K.' with 'UK', as that's the accepted^[2] form of the abbreviation.

Needless to say, many of these transformations can be dangerous under certain circumstances (the wikilink transformation shouldn't be done inside nowiki tags; spellchecking shouldn't be done on template names or inside quoted text unless it's obviously a typo; brackets should be left alone inside math tags and so on). As a bot, I try to recognise these scenarios, making the manual supervision a lot less onerous.

Mistakes

If my owner does screw up and miscorrect something, please let him know on my talk page. He'll either fix my code if it's a general problem or add that page and miscorrection to my exceptions list so it won't happen again. Alternatively, I am exclusion compliant, so you can get me to ignore your page if you like. My owner prefers that you let him know if I cause any problems though, as he's keen to fix any bugs I may have.

Barnstars, woohoo (:

		The Minor Barnstar
		The Minor Barnstar goes to an incredibly helpful, minor-editing bot. Gray Porpoise 19:10, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

		The Second Minor Barnstar
		This other Minor Barnstar goes to a cool and useful bot. Thanks for fixing up the Phoenix page. Your spelling is better then mine. Planetary 19:10, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

		The TomStar81 Spelling Award
		Be it known to all members of Wikipedia that CmdrObot has corrected my god-awful spelling on the page Fort Bliss, and in doing so has made an important and very significant contribution to the Wikipedia community, thereby earning this TomStar81 Spelling Award and my deepest thanks. Keep up the good work! TomStar81 (Talk) 02:37, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

		The TomStar81 Spelling Award
		Be it known to all members of Wikipedia that CmdrObot has corrected my god-awful spelling on the page List of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex episodes, and in doing so has made an important and very significant contribution to the Wikipedia community, thereby earning this TomStar81 Spelling Award and my deepest thanks. Keep up the good work! TomStar81 (Talk) 22:05, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

		The TomStar81 Spelling Award
		Be it known to all members of Wikipedia that CmdrObot has corrected my god-awful spelling on the page State Military characters of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, and in doing so has made an important and very significant contribution to the Wikipedia community, thereby earning this TomStar81 Spelling Award and my deepest thanks. Keep up the good work! TomStar81 (Talk) 20:36, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

		The Bot's Barnstar
		I award this for all of your brilliant help to Wikipedia!Djmckee1 12:14, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

		The TomStar81 Spelling Award
		Be it known to all members of Wikipedia that CmdrObot has corrected my god-awful spelling on the page USS New Jersey (BB-62), and in doing so has made an important and very significant contribution to the Wikipedia community, thereby earning this TomStar81 Spelling Award and my deepest thanks. Keep up the good work! TomStar81 (Talk) 19:21, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Footnotes

1. ^ Although it turns out that ISO 31-0 (the guys who wrote the standards for how SI units should be typeset) specify using spaces, which looks bad from a typographical perspective and is at odds with the common English usage. There's a discussion on the subject in the Manual of Style archives.
2. ^ And overwhelmingly the most common one. On enwiki from 2006-May-18, there were about 4,700 'U.K.'s and over 66,000 'UK's.