User talk:Helpful Pixie Bot/archive

Posts from SmackBot's talk page. Any further discussion should go on my talk page as I don't watch this page.

In most cases I've answered the editor on their talk page as User:Rich Farmbrough. So I've put a quick one line note t those where I've not previously archived my response, in case it's of interest to anyone. Rich Farmbrough 12:46 27 May 2006 (UTC).

Tally of posts

Tally

Comments 51
Good stops 20
Bad(1) stops 17
Vandals 10

(1) In the sense that there was no benefit, not that it was a bad idea.
(I have been conservative, counting as good stops even if the bot wasn't running, and the problem was known and there was no expressed desire to stop, counting as comments "bad stops" unless it was clearly a current problem or there was intent to stop.) So the biggest problem with false stops is people leaving comments, rather than vandals.

Later, Changing the talk page has cut down the number of unintentional stops to near zero. As long as I am cocnientious clearing the talks page, people get the message.

Piddley

I don't appreciate my watchlist being cluttered up with piddly edits such as this one[2] you made at blood.

Make even one change in any thing that is visible, or in where any link actually takes you, then you can have at it to your heart's content. Just stop pissing around with this meaningless stuff--your edits place a much greater burden on the servers than any having to go through a redirect will do, or any extraneous couple of characters in the file size, and most of all it makes people like me angry when we go to see what changes were being made.

I think it is time to follow up on my suggestion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#French Spacing. Gene Nygaard 17:45, 27 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Formatting

I do wish these bots would stop removing blank space under the headings. According to the Wikipedia:Manual of Style (headings)#Spaces, blank spaces are okay:

Spaces above and below headings are completely optional. Spaces between the==and the heading text are also optional (==Heading==vs==Heading==). According to the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, these extra spaces will not affect the appearance of the heading in any way; the rendered page is identical.

I've brought up this issue before (and had my concerns dismissed out of hand—hence, the incendiary nature of some of my comments). I'm beginning to get really tired of having a particular editing style shoved down my proverbial throat. And don't give me guff about how "this is how most other editors want it". These "other editors" are not contributing to the articles that I work on, so why should they give a damn how I do it?

I like neatness; if "most other editors" are sloppy, why should I follow suit. For that matter, if you click on the random article link, you will find that only about 1 out of every 5 articles that comes up actually cites references. If the majority of editors are either too lazy or too careless to cite sources, should I adopt the same lax standards? (That was a rhetorical question.)

I prefer that the text in the editing window be neatly laid out, with clear delineations between the headings and the paragraphs (in fact, this is exactly how the article is displayed to the reader! — why can't the editing window reflect that). However, I would not raise an objection if another editor were to go into an article and change the formatting to suit his or her style before copyediting; but in this case, the change is being done arbitrarily, with no regard for the preferences of individual editors.

I won't actively revert articles that have been reformatted (that would be a waste of time and might also be construed as a violation of WP:POINT). Nonetheless, whenever I go in to edit an article¹, I fully intend to change the formatting to my preferred style. To put it another way, as long as the formatting of the editing window does not affect what the reader sees, the standards that this editor uses are "absolute and non-negotiable".

Note

¹ Here I am referring to articles that I regularly edit.

-,-~^R'lyehRising~-,- 18:38, 27 March 2006 (UTC) Sorry for the rant.[reply]

DOn't no if I replied to this - but you can reformat aricle syou're editing to your hearts content. RF

Useless edit

See this, which does nothing visible on the page. Please fix so that watchlists and changes aren't polluted. Thanks! --TreyHarris 01:08, 28 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I will miniise these edits, but they can't be completely avoided. RF

turning off smackbot

turning off, until fixed

Please don't mess with quotations

JA: Bots should not mess with quotations. Humans will decide if some Other Century author conceivably intended Contemporary WikiSenses for the words in quotations, including but not limited to texts between marks like these → "...", or these → <blockquote>...</blockquote>. Thanks, Jon Awbrey 04:12, 28 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for your note. SmackBot didn't change the targets of any of the links, or the appearance on the page, just simplified them to make them more readable. Regards, Rich Farmbrough 10:25 28 March 2006 (UTC).

BCE linking

The bot is turning links such as 587 BCE into 587 BCE, which is incorrect. Jayjg ^(talk) 04:41, 28 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Problem fixed. RF.

Shaka Labbits

I wanted to stop in and say thank you for delinking the months and stuff. Someone added that and I was too lazy to correct it. Hehe. Thank you very very much! -- NatsukiGirl\^talk 06:30, 28 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh wait... that's wierd, the summary said it delinked dates, but that's not what it did. -- NatsukiGirl\^talk

Natsuki girl missed "&/or general fixes" in the edit summary. RF

Bot using AWB

Hi! Are you confident that a bot should be using an editing tool like AWB? I wouldn't mind if Richard used AWB, but a bot is a bit scary. Thanks --Eddi (Talk) 21:08, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your concern.

The edits currently being made are very simple.
They have been approved at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approvals#SmackBot_Task_Approval by the bot approval group (using AWB or Firefox).
SmackBot has made nearly 100,000 edits with very few problems.
In the event of problems both "rollback" and AWB are available to fix them.
Anyone can stop SmackBot by leaving a message on it's talk page.

Regards, Rich Farmbrough 21:55 13 April 2006 (UTC).

Thank you for your reply. Except for 1, 3, 4, and 5, I am reassured. With some programming experience I'm wary of robots running robots. Anyway, thanks again. --Eddi (Talk) 22:52, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bot's comment doesn't reflect its edit

On the Vanilla Coke page, earlier today I changed "External Link" to "External Links" because there is more than one. Now, the bot showed up and made some comment that looked like it made that change, but all it actually did was change a <BR/> to <br />. I don't really have a problem with that, but the comment attached to the edit is misleading. Philbert2.71828 16:02, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just noticed that I should have put this comment on Rich Farmbrough... I guess it's too late now. Philbert2.71828 16:04, 4 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is another "&/or general fixes" problem - in this case I'fd left it off the edit summary. RF

I think the bot is making bad edits

Beaux Arts Village, Washington:

Old: 4.6% of those under the age of 18 and 2.9% of those 65 and older were living below the poverty line.

New: ... including 4.6% of those under the age of eighteen and 2.9% of those sixty five or over.

I think "18" and "65" should have been left as numerals, and at any rate, if "65" were to be spelled out, it should be hyphenated.

I've seen this at Skykomish, Washington, too.

Thanks!

--Lukobe 00:58, 27 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your note, I have changed the process to use numerics, although that part of the articles is somewhat bogged down with them. Rich Farmbrough 12:33 27 May 2006 (UTC).

/set abort_seq='true'

What is love?

Baby don't hurt me.

No more.

It's

[3]

"As of the 2000 census, it had a total population of 17,823."

to

"As of the 2000 census, it population was 17,823."

you meant

"As of the 2000 census, its population was 17,823."

Please Fix your program--E-Bod 21:06, 31 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. (Now scanning for other occurances.) RF

The edit also moved a miss formated </ref> from the bottom of the page to above the wikilings. It would be nice if you had the bot recognize that both ways are still not fomatted corectly. (the bot did not make a formating mistake but it did move one)--E-Bod 21:11, 31 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also, I prefer "... as of the 2000 census," versus "... at the 2000 Census." If you're still tinkering with this, consider piping a link to United States Census, 2000. Cool that you've programed a bot to do this. -MrFizyx 05:00, 1 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If I do another pass I'll certainly consider it. RF

Bot error

This bot messed up the grammar in the opening sentence of Bowie, Maryland in this edit. --tomf688 (talk - email) 21:17, 31 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, fixed,

Also, in Loveland, Ohio, it lowercased the term "ZIP code", but links to List of ZIP Codes in Ohio and ZIP Code had the term capitalized because of those articles' titles. Some sources that were used as references were also incorrectly lowercased this way. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 03:02, 1 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, leaving ZIP code alone for another (manual) day. RF.

Just FYI, "ZIP" (all caps) is the correct usage.

--Lukobe 22:00, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just to let you know I wasn't changing ZIP to zip! Rich Farmbrough 18:30 3 June 2006 (UTC).

Also, I noticed you tried to simplify the "Geography" section's wording, which is a good idea. But perhaps you could change "...and 0.2 km² (0.1 mi²) of it (1.28%) is water", for example, to "...and 0.2 km² (0.1 mi² or 1.28%) of it is water". That'd make it slightly more grammatically correct, and it'd reduce the number of parentheses, which is a Good Thing™. :^) – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 21:49, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Too late for this pass. Rich Farmbrough 18:30 3 June 2006 (UTC).

amy_(demon)

Amy_(demon) - You are right in re-spelling "Reference" to "References".
From the viewpoint of a "reference section", "reference" is not wrong.
Now thanks you, Emperor_of_Japan#References can be changed too.

I was unaware wikipedia takes these things so serious. My point sorry being. Yy-bo 19:19, 4 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanked on user talk page.

11

??? RF

Please mind the Gap! Please mind the Gap! Please mind the Gap! Pleas

Hi! Smack Bot!

You removed the spaces from an article without looking to see what effect it was having and made nonsense of it. I suppose you meant well! Do you do it automatically, without going to Preview? I've have replaced the gaps. It took 15 minuets to get it right so I'll hope they stay there! Headings jammed vertically between pictures is not good layout in anyone's book. If there is a way to maintain a space between a picture with a small amount of text near it, and the heading of the next paragraph, which needs to be on one line instead of three, then please inform me!

Cathedral architecture of Western Europe

--Amandajm 17:18, 10 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

replied on Talk:Cathedral architecture of Western Europe RF

With how to use the "clear" template. RF

Substantive changes only

Please can you make smackbot skip articles that do not contain what it is changing (i.e. de-linking dates) as it is currently making a number pointless edits. Martin 08:44, 13 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Steps taken. Rich Farmbrough 10:01 13 June 2006 (GMT).

Hey, bot.....

You're changing perfectly sensible year ranges, like 19121924, to read "19121924". Please desist. See G. I. Gurdjieff. I suggest "1912 to 1924". HTH. --TheMadBaron 15:53, 13 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the note. I have changed the settings to avoid doing this while the underlying cause is investigated. Rgds, Rich Farmbrough 16:18 13 June 2006 (GMT).

Moving stub tags

Why does this bot keep moving stub tags to the end of the article? Stub tags should be added at the end of the article content, before the categories and interwiki links. Please correct the bot's behavior. Thank you. —Gordon P. Hemsley→✉ 04:55, 14 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

While there is no mandated place for stubs, the reasons for putting stub tags at the end are twofold:

They are editor information (and a form of sef-reference) not content (or reader information), and therefore logically belong at the end.
In the category listing we want the stub category to be the last category, not the first (Categories: Northwestern Russia geography stubs | Cities and towns in Vologda Oblast).

You can find more discussion here.

Rich Farmbrough 09:53 14 June 2006 (GMT).

Malformatted birthday

Please have a look at this edit [4].--Matthead 08:18, 14 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Matt, I've looked at it. Not sure what you want me to do/learn. SmackBot did nothing wrong there, and cannot fix up date problems it is not mandated to fix by the Bot Approvals Group. Rich Farmbrough 08:50 14 June 2006 (UTC).

Well, it would be nice if it could recognize and fix dates with missing or additional brackets, or similar issues.--Matthead 08:58, 14 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've added brackets to tens of thousands of dates, and am looking to automate this some time soon. The main problem is that dates appear in quotes, URLs, image names, article names names of movements, not to mention the special uses of "September 11" and the ways people choose to write dates see for example. Rich Farmbrough 09:59 14 June 2006 (GMT).

Why will SmackBot's edits not hide

First off, I must apologize for not being a robot. I don't know if humans are supposed to leave messages for bots or not. When I click "hide bot edits" while going through my watchlist, all bot edits except yours are hidden. Why is that? It wouldn't be a big deal, but I have so many geographical pages on my watchlist that it makes it really hard to read if these edits can't be excluded. Thanks, Smacky. You're the best.--Hraefen 15:47, 1 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

- I am also greatly appreciative of all SmackBot does, but I also have a large number of geographical pages changed by it and had the same question (i.e. why are SmackBot's edits not recognized / flagged as bot edits for my watchlist)? Thanks, Ruhrfisch 18:41, 1 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like this bot hasn't gotten the bot flag yet. That's why. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 21:47, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This is correct. It got the flag, then we had a crisis about the process, so I relinquished the flag, the process of re-setting it is happening. Rich Farmbrough 18:32 3 June 2006 (UTC).

Underscores

SmackBot renamed "mod_mono" links to to "mod mono" which is confusing as hell on Mono pages. Thanks though for everything else. --ZacBowling 20:48, 15 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about that. Known bug, request to fix in. Rich Farmbrough 15:05 20 June 2006 (GMT).

Thursday

I reverted the delinking of days of the week in this article, as this is one place where linking is appropriate. Presumably applies to articles on the other days of the week too. Colonies Chris 13:24, 16 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I'm developing whitelists for these links, it will take time. Rich Farmbrough 15:01 20 June 2006 (GMT).

Reading and Leeds Festivals line-ups

Beware, there's a band called Thursday, so these links shouldn't be unlinked, they need to be disambigged to [[Thursday (band)|]]. Colonies Chris 13:23, 16 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, It is very hard to programatically spot these, as with the film May, but I'll do what I can. Rich Farmbrough 15:00 20 June 2006 (GMT).

Months and days

Please make Smacky stop delinking the names of months and days at List of words of disputed pronunciation. In that list, terms like February and Friday are being used as words -- not to refer to dates -- so the links are appropriate. User:Angr 21:22, 25 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. Rich Farmbrough 21:24 25 June 2006 (UTC).

Hello

Do I get to feel any pride for sharing a name with ths bot? --Smack (talk) 19:18, 18 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, both you and User:JoeSmack can share in Smack Pride. Rich Farmbrough 14:57 20 June 2006 (GMT).

General elctions days

Could you please stop delinking Thursday from United Kingdom general election, 1931 - it is directly relevant, as has been discussed on several occasions. Warofdreams talk 23:04, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the note. We are trying to avoid this with whitelists see Wikipedia:Date formattings, but project still in infancy. Rgds, Rich Farmbrough 22:34 26 June 2006 (GMT).

Hockey Night in Canada

This bot seems to keep delinking the word "Saturday" in this article, which is about a TV show that is closely associated with Saturday nights in Canada - and as a result said link is certainly relevant. — stickguy (:^›)— home - talk - 03:45, 1 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK what can I say? If it's useful for a reader of the article to be able to go to the Saturday Article, leave it linked=. Rich Farmbrough 19:32 26 July 2006 (UTC).

Delinking names of months

Normally a good idea, but SmackBot has twice recently delinked the months in the article Month. In that article, the months need to be linked. Please prevent SmackBot from repeating this error. Thanks. -- Slowmover 03:11, 26 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the note. We are trying to avoid this with whitelists see Wikipedia:Date formattings, but project still in infancy. Rgds, Rich Farmbrough 22:34 26 June 2006 (GMT).

Rosemary Kennedy

"(External links is plural as there are more than one." False, there is only one. --GangofOne 05:22, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes Gamaliel had just removed one. Rich Farmbrough 18:26 26 July 2006 (UTC).

Summary

ISBN formatting problems &/or genreal fixes using AWB - Uhh, what's a "genreal" fix? Saw this in an edit summary. Zephyrad 22:21, 26 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

ISBN

This [5] doesn't seem like a good isbn edit. I may not have properly followed the ISBN convention but the bot's edit doesn't seem right.

Thanks!PBF 16:28, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes you are correct, the googlebooks links are broken. Whether we should link to googlebooks is another matter... However thanks for bringing it to my attention, I've fixed the article and will fix the script before running it again. Rich Farmbrough 22:27 16 August 2006 (GMT).

Thanks for your help.PBF 03:18, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

??

HVEC is a myth. The cable shown is a firewire cable

ISBN format

ISBN, (International Standard Book Number)'s should be presented, ISBN 0 00 000000 0 (10 or 13 digets long), WP:CITE#Harvard_referencing (wikipedia guideline for use), ISBN (wikipedia article about the topic). Smack ON ! Terryeo 19:58, 27 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Terry, thanks for your note. The ISBN article states clearly that ISBNs should have spaces or hyphens, and WP doesn't work with spaces. Harvard style, as far as I can tell, has nothing to say about ISBNs, athough the examples in WP use unhyphenated ones. Perhaps I missed something, in which case, please let me know. Rich Farmbrough 22:50 27 August 2006 (GMT).

Note: the mediawiki functionallity has been improved since this was written. RF"

Stop!

Immediately stop editing mathematics articles and changing entity names to UTF-8. The Wikipedia mathematics community has confronted this repeatedly and is in firm agreement that it should not be done.

Also, it is silly to be formatting ISBN-10 numbers rather than replace them with the ISBN-13 convention that becomes the standard in a few months.

Thus, so far as I can tell, this bot has no excuse to continue doing anything. --KSmrq^T 20:23, 27 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your note, I have reviewed the last four or five discussions on Wikiproject Mathematics and there is not firm agreement, what is more one of the pro Unicode voices has been yours! Nonetheless I have stopped the UTF-8 changes.

Part of the reason I am formatting ISBN 10 numbers in in order to be able to change them into ISBN 13 in due course. Rich Farmbrough 23:10 27 August 2006 (GMT).

Incarceration

--Timeshifter 04:01, 28 August 2006 (UTC).[reply]

I have since corrected the error that SmackBot introduced. Here is the current page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration

Version of page just before SmackBot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Incarceration&oldid=71916222

Version just after SmackBot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Incarceration&oldid=72305134

The bot is causing some images to not show up. The image is Table 1 in the section called "Frequency of Incarceration." SmackBot deletes one of the brackets at the beginning of the external link in the caption. It also deletes the 3rd bracket at the end of the caption and link. It obviously is not recognizing the stacked brackets due to the combination of link and image coding ending at the same place. This is a serious problem because it is common to put a source link at the end of a sentence. Here is the correct image coding:

[[Image:USA._Prisoners_1995_to_2005.gif|right|frame| Table 1 from [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pjim05.htm "Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005".] A U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report. The totals do not include people held in juvenile facilities. According to a 2006 OJJDP (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) report there were 97,000 held in juvenile facilities as of October 22, 2003. [http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/nr2006/html/chp7hl.html] ]]

Table 1 from "Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005". A U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report. The totals do not include people held in juvenile facilities. According to a 2006 OJJDP (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) report there were 97,000 held in juvenile facilities as of October 22, 2003. [1]

SmackBot ends up with this coding below, and it causes the image to not show up:

[[Image:USA._Prisoners_1995_to_2005.gif|right|frame|Table 1 from [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pjim05.htm "Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005".] A U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report. The totals do not include people held in juvenile facilities. According to a 2006 OJJDP (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) report there were 97,000 held in juvenile facilities as of October 22, 2003. [[http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/nr2006/html/chp7hl.html]]

I fixed the problem temporarily by rewording the caption and putting the link inside the caption away from the end of the caption. But this problem needs to be fixed, or many images may not be showing up on many wiki pages, and people may not even notice it right away.

There was another image on that wikipedia page that also had a link at the end of the caption. But SmackBot did not mess it up. Probably because the 3 brackets at the end were separated onto 2 lines:

[[Image:Incarceration_rates_worldwide.gif|right|frame|The stats source is the World Prison Population List (6th edition). [http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/world-prison-population-list-2005.pdf]
]]

Thanks for your intervention. I don't think this is as serious as it might initially appear because it only happened, I believe, because an image link had two external links in it, which is very unusual. I've always been impressed with AWB's ability to deal with nested ]] and ], I will pass this detail on to the developers. I will also scan for other occurrences to check for other errors. Thanks again. Rich Farmbrough 09:13 28 August 2006 (GMT).

Bot higher education. I guess the bot needs to learn to count higher then. :) Is it just 2 external links in the image caption that causes the problem? Because that image still has 2 external links in it. And you just now added 2 internal links to that same image caption! Here is the current caption code below.

[[Image:USA._Prisoners_1995_to_2005.gif|right|frame| Table 1 from [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/pjim05.htm "Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005".] A U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report. According to a 2006 OJJDP (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) report there were 97,000 held in juvenile facilities as of [[October 22]] [[2003]]. [http://ojjdp.ncjrs.org/ojstatbb/nr2006/html/chp7hl.html] Add those to the total inmates.]]

People who add internal links for dates are in their rights to do so. See a discussion about linking dates:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican_general_election_2006_controversies

It is in the section titled "WP:DATE and WP:MOS-L are BOTH true. On overlinking." --Timeshifter 10:02, 28 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, I found, I think, about 24 articles with two or more nested []s, only a few had ISBNs, so I was able to ensure the problem did not re-occur for this project. And of course programmers count "0, 1, many" so I hope that AWB will be made perfect soon! Any comments to my talk page please. Rich Farmbrough 11:08 31 August 2006 (GMT).

Smackbot bug

Check out this edit. Obviously the article was not properly formatted to begin with, but Smackbot mangled it. Have a look at the resulting article. Shouldn't be too difficult to fix I imagine. Kaldari 02:27, 30 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Also, I was not able to find any documentation of either of the following:

That moving category listings is a current task of Smackbot
That moving category listings is an approved task of Smackbot

Please address these issues on Smackbot's user page if possible. Thank you. Kaldari 02:53, 30 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thaks for the message. Bug passed to developers. Issues addressed on user page. Rich Farmbrough 15:32 30 August 2006 (GMT).

Wrong evaluation of ISBN conformity

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Socrate&diff=72797991&oldid=72786808 - reverting SmackBot's erroneous evaluation of an ISBN. Edit summary "rv, there's nothing wrong with the Gillmor ISBN, there's something wrong with SmackBot's evaluation of ISBN's"

The Gillmor ISBN is clickable, and leads for example to this list (via the http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=0393308103 function): [6]

Apparently, SmackBot evaluates the viability of an ISBN differently from how the automatic ISBN function does (the ISBN function has no trouble to only include the ISBN number, excluding other numbers that follow on the same line). SmackBot should not follow a different algorithm accusing an ISBN of being "invalid", when in reality it is perfectly valid, and operational with the automatic ISBN function.

SmackBot should re-iterate all cases where such "invalid ISBN" tag might have been inserted when the ISBN is in fact valid. --Francis Schonken 11:21, 30 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the information, we will scan for any other occurances of this problem. Rich Farmbrough 15:34 30 August 2006 (GMT).

Sorry, I see that SmackBot continues activity, without giving assurance that the bug where it reads ISBNs differently from how the automatic ISBN function reads them has been repaired. Please make clear what happened. The repair to Socrate was manual by the bot operator, and not a confirmation of the bot's algorithm repair. --Francis Schonken 18:27, 30 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, nothing has changed, SmackBot still flags ISBN's as incorrect, that are correct according to the automatic ISBN function. I specifically requested that the same algorithm would be used as the automatic ISBN function uses. It was confirmed by the bot operator that this was the case (after two times asking the same question). Apparently this was a plain lie, or even plainer incompetence, see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geel&diff=72981442&oldid=72912220 where I reverted SmackBot's faulty ISBN assesment again (edit summary: "there's nothing wrong with the first Roosens ISBN"). --Francis Schonken 07:14, 31 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There were a total of 10 articles where this could have been a problem, all have been dealt with. Rich Farmbrough 09:32 31 August 2006 (GMT).

I did not say that the algorithm would be the same as mediawikis. ISBN XXX is valid under the mediawiki software, but completely invalid in real life as is ISBN 12312-1231-23131-3-4-34-1-3-1432. Rich Farmbrough 11:14 31 August 2006 (GMT).

Note: the mediawiki functionallity has been improved since this was written. RF"

Incidentally calling someone a liar, or incompetant, even prefaced with the word "apparently" is both a breach of WP:NPA and not a good way to make co-operative progress. Rich Farmbrough 11:20 31 August 2006 (GMT).

See also discussion on my talk page. R.F.

Errett Bishop article: was ISBN 0-12-622760-8 flagged incorrectly?

On the article about the mathematician Errett Bishop, SmackBot marked the ISBN of one of my references as invalid (Schechter: Handbook of Analysis and its Foundations).

Here is the Library of Congress entry for Eric Schechter's book:

LC Control Number: 96032226

Type of Material: Book (Print, Microform, Electronic, etc.)

Brief Description: Schechter, Eric, 1950-

Handbook of analysis and its foundations / Eric Schechter.

San Diego : Academic Press, c1997.

xxii, 883 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

ISBN 0-12-622760-8 (alk. paper) ...

CALL NUMBER: QA300 .S339 1997

Could the check digit be wrong? The web site http://ww w.isbn-check.com accepts 0126227608 as a valid ISBN. (i.e. the check digit is correctly calculated). Does 0126227608 have some subtle problem that is more than just the check digit? EdJohnston 01:27, 31 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your note, and taking the trouble to check, this was caused by trailing dashes. I will scan for similar articles. Rich Farmbrough 10:57 31 August 2006 (GMT).

(All now fixed - thanks Ed)

Gesta Danorum: ISBN 978-87-12-04025-5 flagged as incorrect!

ISBN 978-87-12-04025-5 was flagged as incorrect in the article Gesta Danorum. But its not an icorrect ISBN-13. Here is a direct link. Twthmoses 07:14, 31 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your note. I plan to review all ISBN-13 articles tonight. Rich Farmbrough 10:53 31 August 2006 (GMT).

Linear B

This bot trashed most of the article on Linear B. Please stop it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Twospoonfuls (talk • contribs)

Thanks for stopping the bot. This is a serious problem although I think just the one article was affected. If I am wrong, and assuming you are a working on this area, you may come across any others, please let me know if you do. Once I have identified the problem I will scan for other pages which might have the same symptoms. Regards, Rich Farmbrough 10:50 31 August 2006 (GMT).

Buck House

Re: Buckingham Palace - I have reverted your addition of this to Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs which nomination, by the by, seems insulting to many writers who have sweated blood over their articles. (I refer you to Richard Carlson's book Don't Sweat the Small Stuff - "it is better to be kind than to be right", or words to that effect.)

The Olwen Headley book cited under References - which I did not cite, but I have contributed extensively to this article - has the correct ISBN (as per the Encyclopaedia Britannica and my copy of the book). It has been out of print for ages and I have removed the hyphens in that ISBN in order to prevent the bot picking it up again. Please stop the bot on this article.

I won't get into the minutiae of ISBNs because a) my mind can't grapple with that kind of stuff and b) I am more concerned with the content of the articles in general - but each to their own.

With thanks and best wishes. -- FClef (talk) 03:17, 1 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I certainly didn't mean to be rude to the editors of the article (of which I am one), apologies if I was. I've checked out the book as described above by ED, at the British Library. I suspect the discrepancy is due to the change from SBN (the old UK system) to ISBN, which was done by adding a 0- to the front of the numbers. While not all publishers follow the rules, the correct format according the International ISBN Agency is four groups separated by spaces or dashes. Spaces break wiki-(ISBN)-links, so dashes are our best option. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 20:36 1 September 2006 (GMT).

Sirona

On Sirona why did your bot mark an ISBN with {{invalid isbn|2-287772-237-6}}? What makes you think its invalid? --Nantonos 12:04, 2 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's 11 digits long, ISBNs are 10 (soon to be 13). Rich Farmbrough, 22:30 2 September 2006 (GMT).

Longevity

Hi - On Longevity you added a link that was definitly very spam like: http://www.lexmd.com/ph/catalog-product-detail;catalogproducts,d639d0f6b7f7eeaaa9b64fe09b778089.html. Whats up with that!? Xoe26 17:44, 2 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, here is SmackBot's edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Longevity&diff=72372945&oldid=69635178. Rgds. Rich Farmbrough, 22:30 2 September 2006 (GMT).

Wrong template?

Invalid ISBNs are being replaced with a "Please check" template, and that doesn't exist, so nothing shows up, such as in Richard Wagner. Is this the intention? -- JHunterJ 20:07, 8 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This was OK, the bot was performing it's appointed task correctly. (Phew!). R.F.

Ohio State Article

The bot is definately wrong regarding the entry on Ohio State's article. The bot is tagging it as an invalid ISBN. The number, however, was taken directly from the text and clicking on it leads to numerous library locations for the book in question.:ISBN 814201415 .--Sam Harmon 21:11, 8 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Sam. This ISBN has only 9 digits. The current generation of ISBNs all have 10 digits. It's clearly invalid. EdJohnston 21:18, 8 September 2006 (UTC).[reply]

If you add a leading zero you get 0814201415, which is valid and is found by Amazon. EdJohnston 21:21, 8 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bad edits by smackbot on isbn

I am looking at the book 'Edison a Biography' referenced in the Thomas Edison article. Smackbot says tyhe ISBN is wrong, but it is correct. Please turn off this demented bot. Or perhaps rename it "Vandalbot" because that appears to be a better description. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Edison (talk • contribs)

Luckily my reply to this was never left. A kind user pointed to the correct way to make a 10 digit ISBN from a 9 digit SBN (put a "0-" at the beginning).Rich Farmbrough 21:54 8 September 2006 (UTC).

13 digit ISBN

This edit doesn't make any sense to me - clicking through brings up the correct book. Ditto on this one. I just checked these two. Guettarda 02:22, 9 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorted. RF

Bolding article name image name

Like wise this edit http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starstreak_missile&diff=72368323&oldid=70446152 (bolded image name that happened to be the same as the article title) Megapixie 00:22, 10 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, this appears to be a bug in AWB. Passed to developers. Rich Farmbrough, 12:28 10 September 2006 (GMT).

Anon user

moo

Naughty ISBNs

Hey Page me as to which ISBNs are wrong on the Plotinus page?! LoveMonkey 13:20, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

These two ISBN 082041765 {{Please check ISBN|082041765 (too short)}}-b, ISBN 07396392 {{Please check ISBN|07396392 (too short)}} . One is too short, the other contains a "b". Rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 18:15 22 September 2006 (GMT).

Please rev the vandalism at Longfellow

some-body has put junk on the picture. Could You please erase it, since you seem to be adept at Wik technical stuff?Kdammers 22:59, 25 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:SmackBot is just a robot. However I've looked briefly at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and reverted soem vandalism. The pictures look OK though. Rich Farmbrough, 21:01 26 September 2006 (GMT).

Be hyper-intelligent

I see you're doing a pass of album infoboxes in light of recent WikiProject Album changes. But I was wondering if it should be that, as in this edit, the bot should pick up on the old background color and then change the type to equal the proper type of album, if needed? Just a thought. --Fisherjs 15:52, 8 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A good idea in principle, but one of the reasons the background field is going is that it was inconsistently used, so we could end up giving albums the wrong type. It would also be tricky to resolve clashes between type and background. Thanks from the note. Rich Farmbrough, 16:06 8 October 2006 (GMT).

Consider carefully what you are doing!!

You appear to be editing things just for the sake of it ie English Riviera. Perhaps you should contribute rather than edit?! The official site has been deleted! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.77.114.200 (talk • contribs)

Apparently meaningless chunterings from an anon with only this edit to his IP. Rich Farmbrough, 23:21 15 November 2006 (GMT).

So they're "studio albums" now?

This bot seems to be going through many album wikis now (particularly most of the ones I've created and contributed) and labelling them as "studio albums". I would've already done this myself if I was previously aware that we as editors had to state the obvious. It's a little annoying, but more so when it labels Bloodrock Live as being a studio album when the title clearly implies otherwise. I'm changing it to what must be the "appropriate" format. That's all. Filter1987 03:13, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No it didn't do that. That was a change in the {{:tl:Infobox Album}} at around the same time. Rich Farmbrough, 21:55 16 November 2006 (GMT).

Tracklisting(s)

The bot changed "tracklistings" to "track listing" on John Mayer's As Is album

This is grammatically incorrect to seperate these words, as the united phrase is a word in an of itself.

Further, the error occured in that it reduced the word from a plural to a single, however, as the album in question had multiple sets of tracklistings, it was incorrect in doing so.

But as I first said, more importantly, it shouldn't be converting something that's correct grammar to something that's not.

Thanks, 149.135.107.58 14:11, 10 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, sorry but there is no such word as "tracklisting". But you are right bout the plural, of course Rich Farmbrough, 23:21 15 November 2006 (GMT).

Vandalism

nigger —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.240.156.151 (talk • contribs)

Apparently offensive chunterings from an anon with only this edit to his name. Rich Farmbrough, 23:21 15 November 2006 (GMT).

Welcome!

Hello, Helpful Pixie Bot, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Stealth7 05:25, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks

For the welcome you left SmackBot. It is actually quite an old hand, but appreciates the sentiment. Rich Farmbrough, 23:21 15 November 2006 (GMT).

Yeti

Not sure what this place is, but is seems a postitive place. I've noticed that you have put in or corrceted ISBNs on books that I've cited, well I'm happy about that. Any feedback welcome . . . . . . . as long as its positive. (Gowron 23:51, 18 November 2006 (UTC))[reply]

Note left.

SPIM

Correct "External link" to "External links" in articles with more than one external link.

Well, this doesn't look like correct behavior. There's only one weblink in the article. Maybe something to fix. -- Amtiss, SNAFU ? 16:44, 19 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Note of thanks left.

Editions

I'm not sure about this - I've seen them on Wikipedia with and without the hyphens. John Lennon is the one you changed tonight. Tvoz 05:06, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Don't worry, this is the ISBN standard way of displaying them. Rich Farmbrough 07:22 23 November 2006 (UTC).

Viper edits

I should have said this earlier, but SmackBot has been making some irritating edits to the collection of over 150 articles under Category:Vipers. I've developed a rather unique style for the beginning of these articles that consists of a list of common names above the introduction. This list is separated from the introduction by two blank lines. Smackbot keeps deleting the second of these two blank lines and I'd like it to stop doing that. The latest example is Daboia. Thanks, --Jwinius 13:02, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I've put in a special rule to ensure two blamk lines after the Common name line in members of rattlesnke, pit viper and true viper categories. I'm a bit uneasy about a set of pages with "special layout", certainly the common names should be in bold, perhaps the style used for redirects as at the top of Autopsy might be better. Rich Farmbrough, 09:27 24 November 2006 (GMT).

P.S. please let me know if this layout changes. Rich Farmbrough, 09:51 24 November 2006 (GMT).

Thanks for modifying your bot for me. I'm aware that my style is not that popular with the other editors, but it's not like I didn't give it any thought (see style). I am fundamentally opposed to Wikipedia's common name naming policy for article titles and by extension the popular introduction style. This solution works best for me, and let's not forget that the right to ignore the rules is also an official policy. In addition, I've been receiving encouragement from many non-editors, and a while back Bitis arietans and Bitis gabonica were given Good Article status despite being different, so the style I've developed must not be all that bad. Nevertheless, should anything change I'll let you know.--Jwinius 12:57, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

13-digit ISBNs problems again

Please have a look at this diff, where 978-0-898714-54-8 is "corrected" to 978-978-0-898714-54-8. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 03:03, 24 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I think there is something subtley wrong with the ISBN which is stopping me from parseing it (one of the dasehes perhaps). I will investigate in more detail tonight. Rich Farmbrough, 09:27 24 November 2006 (GMT).

There wasn't, it was a problem with certain formats. RF.

ISBN Refs

I use ISBN numbers to mark references by name (like ref name="isbnxxxxx...") in article Hinduism. Sometimes these are concatenated with page numbers etc. These were formatted by the bot. This may be breaking the reference links (not sure!). Please fix it so that it does not touch ref names. Thanks. ɤіɡʍаɦɤʘʟʟ 20:09, 28 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Article fixed up. Will look at your suggestion. Rich Farmbrough, 11:03 29 November 2006 (GMT).

What is this bot

Hi, I am new to Wikipedia and would like to know what is this bot? thanks --Darrendeng 07:52, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is my account for making mass edits. Primarily I use WP:AWB. At the moment it is going through a backlog of articles labelled as "unreferenced" ({{:tl:unreferenced}} and dating the tags so that ediotrs hav some idea of how log they have been tagged for. This focusses effort on the older tagged articles and helps generate a sense of acheivement. We already do the same with a lot of other tags like "cleanup" and "wikify". Rich Farmbrough, 09:39 29 November 2006 (GMT).

Bad tagging?

Your bot seems to be changing {{unreferenced}} tags so that they are dated, but I only see it adding June or July 2006 to them. Is there something wrong with it? _JD^talk 09:09, 29 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, it's driven off the dates of the database dumps - and hence is not 100% accurate. See Template_talk:Unreferenced#This_should_be_a_deletion_template for more discussion. Rich Farmbrough, 09:29 29 November 2006 (GMT).

Extra | breaking templates

Lee Evans (presenter) and Webmercial SmackBot added an extra |, breaking the template. ~ BigrTex 00:19, 1 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, fixed. Will scan for other occurences later. Rich Farmbrough 07:26 1 December 2006 (UTC).

Shouldn't talk pages be ignored?

The bot recently made a change to Talk:ColdFusion. I don't think it should have. Especially as the template tag was between <nowiki> tags. —Wrathchild ^(talk) 13:08, 1 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the nowiki'd ones should be ignored, and are since about 7:56 this morning. Talk pges should be addressed though because some editors prefer to put maint tags there, with good reason. Thanks for the message Rich Farmbrough 20:22 1 December 2006 (UTC).

Blanking content

On this edit, SmackBot blanked the page. --Matt 00:05, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Matt. Deeply disturbing, but can scan for it. Regards, Rich Farmbrough 00:09 2 December 2006 (UTC).

Seems to have been due to this wikimedia problrm. Rich Farmbrough, 22:44 2 December 2006 (GMT).

Shocking problem

On the page Shock troops The edit by SmackBot got the month wrong. (Revision as of 06:29, 6 August 2006) --Philip Baird Shearer 00:24, 30 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for letting me know. Of necessity the months are an approximation, since the lists are compiled form historical data umps which occured at "random" times. I have changed the edit sumary to reflect this. Rich Farmbrough 08:10 30 November 2006 (UTC).

Edit to List of popular songs based on classical music

For some reason, the bot not only blanked the entire page, but added some random AFD. Obviously there was some weird error. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ 00:28, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to have been due to this wikimedia problrm. Rich Farmbrough, 22:44 2 December 2006 (GMT).

Edit to Peanuts in popular culture

SmackBot has replaced the entire Peanuts in popular culture article with its own maintenance data. I will revert. Also, I believe the unreferenced header is inappropriate to the article at this stage. There are something like seven references, and most of the material comes directly from the source tv shows and so on on. Karen | Talk | contribs 00:29, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to have been due to this wikimedia problrm. Rich Farmbrough, 22:44 2 December 2006 (GMT).

Anon vandal

laskdjf ;alskdjf;lkasdjm;klsd jk;sldjj;klssjkl;ksdj lk;sd jfl;skdjf;lskdj fs;abalasllaasdfiuasdkjf

Manual edit

SmackBot seemed to mess up the templates on the APUG article, changing {{notability|date=December 2006}} to {{notaility}} and losing the sources template altogether. SteveHopson 15:17, 2 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

This was a typing error on my part (overriding the bot). Thanks for letting me know. Rich Farmbrough, 22:48 2 December 2006 (GMT).

Stopping bot

Bot needs stopped. Why is it turning citation needed templates into a completely different template? Also seems to be adding articles directly to Category:Articles lacking sources when an unreferenced template has been substituted. This should not be done. Bot should be smart enough to not add articles directly to that category. --- RockMFR 18:56, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I know, I'm fixing them. Thanks for telling me anyway. Rich Farmbrough 18:59 3 December 2006 (UTC).

Alright. --- RockMFR 19:02, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Vandal

?

A Bit Like Above

The Bot needs to be stopped, well, i know that much but what i want to know is why Wikipedia hasnt done anything about it (Banned Ip, Banned User, Notified Parents etc.) Wouldn't it be easier to just do that instead of putting 76 comments about this Bot vandalising Wikipedia. I want this info to be absolutely accurate on this site if I want to get 20 out of 20 on my school projects(Im in year 5)> I Just wanrt wikipedias admins to do something about it. Yours Sincerely Tom140996 06:38, 7 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Tom,

SmackBot has made over 250,000 edits to Wikipedia, so 75 complaints isn't bad going. However if you look more closely, some are not complaints but praise, some are complaints that are wrong, and some are just things like "moo". Of course I welcome people telling me if something is going wrong, because I can then fix it, and in fact if you leave a message on SmackBot's talk page it then stops editing until I can solve the problem. Of course some silly people think it's fun to stop it "for laughs" but generally they are so silly the leave messages when SmackBot isn't even running! Thanks for taking an interest in my robot. Rich Farmbrough, 23:18 10 December 2006 (GMT).

Strange edits

This one[7], for instance. (There is at least one more.) Cheers —Ian Spackman 16:52, 9 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Keep up the otherwise good work, though. —Ian Spackman 16:54, 9 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the note. Rich Farmbrough 19:28 9 December 2006 (UTC). P.S. All fixed. Rich Farmbrough 19:29 9 December 2006 (UTC).

Improperly flagging already categorized stubs?

Unless I'm misunderstanding the intent, at the time the bot flagged them as uncategorized these stubs were in fact already categorized.

--Dfred 00:55, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes he's right, only done a few of these, not doing it anymore. Rich Farmbrough, 23:02 10 December 2006 (GMT).

Replacing PAGENAME

Why are you replacing PAGENAME with the name of the article? [8] for instance. — Omegatron 03:00, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is one of WP:AWB's "general fixs". It is done because it makes the source more readable and saves server load. I only do "gen fixes", by and large as a side benefit of another edit. These particular categories actually belonged to a tag which was substed (or possibly cut-and pasted) here, the cat's consolidated here and the tag removed without the cats here. I have removed the cats. Regards. Rich Farmbrough, 19:57 11 December 2006 (GMT).

Extreme Networks

I just noticed that the information that I put in Wikipedia about Extreme Networks was deleted. Is there a reason why this was deleted?

Regards, Ed

Hi Ed, SmackBot did not remove the info. USer:JonHarder did. Suggest you read WP:COI. Regrds. Rich Farmbrough, 19:31 13 December 2006 (GMT).

Viper edits

I mentioned this before last November 23rd, but it looks like we're back to square one. Once again, SmackBot is making some irritating edits to the collection of over 150 articles in Category:Vipers. I've developed a rather unique style for the beginning of these articles that consists of a list of common names above the introduction. This list is separated from the introduction by two blank lines. Smackbot keeps deleting the second of these two blank lines and I'd like it to stop doing that. The latest example is Porthidium (which I'm about to restore). Thanks, --Jwinius 13:02, 23 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, sorry about that. You'll have had a busy time with many AWB edits I guess. I'm changeing all the articles to have non-breaking spaces on the blank lines, which will innoculate them against AWB's standard changes with the current version of the software. Rich Farmbrough, 21:35 15 December 2006 (GMT).

Your last change actually made things worse. Would you mind undoing the damage, please? --Jwinius 01:24, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is that better? Rich Farmbrough, 11:58 16 December 2006 (GMT).

Some ISBNs

Edward Watkin. Have checked the ISBN in the book and it is as stated. Peter I. Vardy 15:08, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Beeston Castle. But you are right about this one; one digit wrong - I have a lot to correct! Peter I. Vardy 15:15, 16 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Anon vandal

lolz

What is the importance of ISBN formatting?

Rich, I am curious as to why so much focusing on formatting of book ISBN's. The British Library does'nt format ISBN's, the Library of Congress does'nt format ISBN's, and Amazon does'nt format them.

I don't really have a preference one way or another, but I would appreciate learning why you think it is important to format them.

Also, it would help all of us, who write articles which include the ISBN's of referenced books, if you could explain how the formatting is done so that we could format them when we use them in articles. Is there a simple algorithm or methodology that the robot uses?

I look forward to your responses to the above two questions. Regards and Happy Holidays! - mbeychok 05:01, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I started off correcting ISBNs that were written "ISBN:" - the colon breaks wikimagic. Then I noticed that many numbers were written with spaces "1 223 32333 X" - same problem (but now fixed) the more I looked the more I found wrong. So now I format correctly all ISBN numbers which I can, and flag up any invalid numbers - currently 2600 + and people have already corrected some 800.

What are the benfits?

Wikimagic will now work
The ISBN is correctly formatted (according to the ISBN standard)
language area and publisher can be told from the ISBN together with other hints.
WP looks more uniform and cosnistant.
(Most) invalid numbers are caught and eventually fixed.

How to do it: the rules published by the International ISBN Agency[9].

Rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 12:12 20 December 2006 (GMT).

Michael Hagemeister

Thanks for fixing the above.

One problem remains, & I don't know how to fix it.

It says, on the bottom, that it is in the category of invalid ISBN numbers.

I've checked, and that seems wrong.

Can you fix that?

Thanks, --Ludvikus 14:43, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, the first ISBN in the "works" section seems invalid. Are you able to check it? Rich Farmbrough 19:02 20 December 2006 (UTC).

Reference/s

Seem to recall reading in a wikistyle guide that plural is optional. I see both in paper world. Ta for ISBN fix. Fred.e 17:24, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, MoS has changed now. Rich Farmbrough 19:03 20 December 2006 (UTC).

Vandal

Needed turned off.

Algae

I just searched for the 10-digit ISBN for Lee's book from the article Ascoseirales, and I can find the book on Amazon. I then inserted the 13-digit that SmackBot replaced it with, and guess what? I can't find the ISBN. I saw the ISBN discussion page, but I really don't want to have to go in an revert all my algae articles now or in the future with reference this book as it is available now. I suggest that instead of editing the 10-digit ISBNs to 13 digits one for now, you reprogram SmackBot to simply add a comma and the 13-digit ISBN. Thank you. KP Botany 00:23, 24 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, ISBN changing is currently in a hiatus until we decide, either to do what you suggest, or wait until more librries are up to speed with ISBN-13 or soemthing similar. Rich Farmbrough, 12:26 24 December 2006 (GMT).

List of longest novels

Twice you've removed the wikilinks from the section headers in this article. But the way it's currently formatted, those links are the only ones to each author and title. Please don't make this edit on this article again. Thanks. --zenohockey 04:04, 24 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

New ISBN System?

Below are items from the Berne Trial article.

Notice that Amazon.com now has a numeric suffix right after the "ISBN" acronym.

Please advise.

Below is what I've done (put up the parentheses, and repeated "ISBN").

Yours truly, --Ludvikus 18:23, 25 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

   (ISBN-10) ISBN 0853035954
   (ISBN-13) ISBN 978-0853035954

Please undo cat and bot

at George Temple-Poole. The first isbn I checked seems fine. It linked here

LePage, building a ...

Don't forget to remove category. Thanking you in advance. Fred 10:39, 27 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Malfunction in your bot.

This bot is incorrectly removing links on at least two highway pages I-90 exit list where he pulled all links to states and List of long-distance mileage signs in the United States where it removed links to several highway sign images. JohnnyBGood t c VIVA! 17:58, 27 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Edit summaries

"template" is mis-spelled :) Salad Days 22:27, 27 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, fixed. Rich Farmbrough 22:30 27 December 2006 (UTC).

A report on your wrong editing

I found SmackBot may use AWB in wrong way or AWB has some BUGS. So SmackBot should search and correct the errors. For example, the history of Abraham Kovoor's challenge is below.

unreference tag was added at 00:47,26November2005 by Jeffq

[10]

references added at 09:42,18January 2006 by MANOJTV

[11]

unreference tag was removed at 09:48, 18 January 2006 by MANOJTV

[12]

source tag added at 02:35,29September2006 by Arbustoo

[13]

unreference tag was added at 23:10,28November2006 by SmackBot

[14]

That is only one example. I found this learning on Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2005.(Abraham Kovoor's challenge is the first article of this category.) But perhap SmackBot can easily find these errors and correct all errors with using AWB. (I cannot use AWB sorry.)Penpen0216 16:58, 30 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Replied to the effect that template "sources" is a redirect to "unreferenced". Rich Farmbrough, 20:25 30 December 2006 (GMT).

About C++0x: underscores cannot be omitted in C++ language

Inside the article C++0x there are some word written in widthfixed font that refered C++ code. This word are keywords or libraies defined by the C++ standard, theirs underscores cannot be omitted.

Example: static_cast is different from static cast. Unfortunately I connected this word to the page Static cast but often some bot change it from <code>[[static cast|static_cast]]</code> in <code>[[static cast]]</code>. How can I stop this misunderstanding? --Gildos 14:48, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have requested a change in AWB which would prevent this. I'll re -request it. Rich Farmbrough, 18:32 12 January 2007 (GMT).

P.S. you could try static_cast . Rich Farmbrough, 18:35 12 January 2007 (GMT).

Spelling

User:SmackBot incorrectly dated a template in Computing_Pi. It changed {{Unreferencedsect}} to {{Unreferecnedsect|date=January 2007}} (Misspelled), this may be happening elsewhere. Deathbob 22:44, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. 3 articles caught and corrected. Rich Farmbrough, 11:03 15 January 2007 (GMT).

Uh.

this bot is malfunctioning turn off

5th edit from this user. Left message explaining that this is not a helpful message, and that SB wasn't running when it was left. RF

Changes

I have made several changes to the Kristi Tauti page. Please let me know if they are enough to remove the clean-up tag. Angel,Isaac 02:39, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot is a robot that (among other things) dates cleanup tags. It does not apply them. However I have cleaned up the article, and if you get rid of the "all caps" title section (i.e.put it in the appropriate case), I think you could remove the cleanup tag. However I am adding a COI tag to the talk page, as the article seems to have been written in the first person. Rich Farmbrough, 11:09 15 January 2007 (GMT).

Images and links in headers

HELP--400-Series Highways of Ontario is zapping images...I've reversed it twice today!! Bacl-presby 01:05, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ref strangeness

Can someone check out the SmackBot edits to the Skandha article[15]. Looks kinda wrong. Perhaps an error occurred because the Smackbot-modified {{citation needed}} tag was within a <ref></ref> markup? Thanks for any correction (even if it's only a correction of my perception), Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 03:45, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You're correct. The wiki software wasn't "subst"ing as it should, I've fixed the page and will log a bug. Rich Farmbrough, 14:08 8 February 2007 (GMT).

Weird Edits

Made a bizzarre edit of turning a citation needed tag into a date and time on the Judy Garland page. --Ozgod 14:01, 8 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's quite correct. "Citation needed" is a redirect to "Fact", and a date (no time) is added to help classify the enormous numbers of articles with citations needed. Rich Farmbrough, 14:08 8 February 2007 (GMT).

Wikibug again

The bot is attempting to add date and category material to fact templates located within <ref> </ref> footnotes. It fails and leaves the date in the footnotes. See Scientific Revolution for examples --SteveMcCluskey 02:10, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is a WikiMedia bug. Let me know of any you see and I'll fix them. Rich Farmbrough 09:21 9 February 2007 (UTC).

About bots...

I was wondering about these bots and how they are created. Can any registered user create one?

Helps if you can read and understadn the consequences of your actions. <sigh> Suitable message left. RF

Dates

It is date fixing maintenance tags, but using this month when most of the tags are many months old Fiddle Faddle 11:50, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

On smack

Re this edit... [17] Smackbot is ~~on smak~~ malfunctioning. Hope he gets better soon, very useful bot (normally) --Monotonehell 12:12, 19 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Yes, problem identified as an AWB stangeness, probably bigfixed now. However I'm avoiding "general fixes" at the moment for other less weird reasons. Rich Farmbrough 12:18 19 February 2007 (UTC).

Date/fix maintenance tags

The bot should also fix lower-case months in tags. --32X 11:52, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(Partially) implemented when it comes across them. Can do scans when my other PC is ressurected. Rich Farmbrough 18:47 20 February 2007 (UTC).

weird edit:

The bot has tagged Milky Way and added it to the category Category:Articles with unsourced statements since February $3. Shouldn't that be: Category:Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007. --mikeu 19:43, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

same thing happed on the XM Sirius Merger article. The edit reads:Insert {{Merge|Kermanshah|date=February $3}}

Looks like a text-substitution flag isn't being filled in correctly.

-- TomXP411^[Talk] 20:48, 20 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, all found and fixed now. Rich Farmbrough, 21:36 20 February 2007 (GMT).

Incorrect dating of fact templates

Please stop incorrectly dating older fact tags as "February 2007" A DRV is currently under discussion about the category the bot operates from. Thank you.

The only older tags being dated are ones that have been reverted. Almost all tags being dated now are todays. Rich Farmbrough 23:44 23 February 2007 (UTC).

Hi

Hi yourself.

Automated message to bot owners

As a result of discussion on the village pump and mailing list, bots are now allowed to edit up to 15 times per minute. The following is the new text regarding bot edit rates from Wikipedia:Bot Policy:

Until new bots are accepted they should wait 30-60 seconds between edits, so as to not clog the recent changes list and user watchlists. After being accepted and a bureaucrat has marked them as a bot, they can edit at a much faster pace. Bots doing non-urgent tasks should edit approximately once every ten seconds, while bots who would benefit from faster editing may edit approximately once every every four seconds.

Also, to eliminate the need to spam the bot talk pages, please add Wikipedia:Bot owners' noticeboard to your watchlist. Future messages which affect bot owners will be posted there. Thank you. --Mets501 05:02, 22 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Unsourced"

The articles Torrasque and Hunter Killer (StarCraft) both received a tagging of unsourced. They both contain sources, but only primary sources. I'm sorry if it is supposed to do that, but I figured they should be tagged as lacking secondary sources. Captain panda In vino veritas 13:14, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No probs. It actually dates existing tags, does not (generally) add new ones. I would argue that in these two articles,"primary sources" are fine and dandy, and are all that is needed. Statements such as "The Zerg are the most horrifying creature in the video game" would require an external source, of course, but factual statements that are easily verified by playing the game or reading the manual seem fine to me. Rich Farmbrough, 13:48 2 March 2007 (GMT).

"|date=" vs "|"

The {{cn}} template works perfectly well with the date given plain, e.g.: {{cn|March 2007}} ; for some reason the Bot is changing this to {{cn|date=March 2007}}. It may not be a huge problem, but it seems to be rather a waste of time, and clogs up my (and presumably others') Watchlist. (The same applies to {{fact}}, and possibly others.) --Mel Etitis (Talk) 15:26, 3 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

{{cn}} is a redirect to {{fact}}. With a plain date the argument is "thrown away", with "date=" it affects the cleanup category. Conversely, {{wikify}} only "works" with a plain date (although I have been thinking about making it accept "date=" as well). Best wishes, Rich Farmbrough, 16:39 3 March 2007 (GMT).

Speedy

A tag has been placed on 2007 British television phone-in scandal, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.

Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. If you plan to expand the article, you can request that administrators wait a while for you to add contextual material. To do this, affix the template {{hangon}} to the page and state your intention on the article's talk page. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this.

citations

SmackBot thanks for your help on the Glen E. Friedman article. i have found the citations you requested but don't know how to properly format them. do you mind doing them for the article?

the first one you requested was for the line:

"Friedman has helped define the moment and movements he was caught up in" this came from DAZED& CONFUSED magazine, issue#11 1995 p.46 and has been used many places since in other articles. The original is archived on http://www.southern.com/BURNINGFLAGS/press/dazed.html

the second one you requested :

"His process was much more incendiary than it was documentary" this came from "HUH magazine, November 1994 and has been used many places since in other articles. The original is archived at http://www.southern.net/BURNINGFLAGS/press/huh.html

the third one : "A consummate artist and political activist, he shuns intoxicants, and follows a strict vegan diet"

Can be seen in many places. The 1st two sources i have are:

Herbivore magazine, fall 2003 which is archived at http://www.southern.com/BURNINGFLAGS/press/herbivore.php

and also on

the PETA2 web pages in an interview http://www.peta2.com/outthere/o-glenfried.asp

thank you!

Notability

Smackbot left a notability mark on the Luncarty_F.C. page and there was no reason for it. (El Severe 16:23, 16 March 2007 (UTC))[reply]

ALECTRIC451 added the notability tag[18]; SmackBot just dated it. - Dudesleeper · Talk 16:37, 16 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Problem with SmackBOt

I prod'd a page (University of Health Sciences) and SmackBot keeps removing the prod with the comment it is fixing date/maintenance tags Postcard Cathy 14:23, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wage Regulation

Wow, I definitely second your request to have the wage regulation article checked for POV. Good job stumbling across that one. Chris01720 23:12, 29 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Can SB correct parameters?

[Stopping becasue of ... ] of this; can it be tweaked to avoid this sort of change? --Mel Etitis (Talk) 10:18, 31 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Mel, can't remember if I answered this first time around. SB deals with about 200 templates to perfrom this innocuous seeming task, and they can all be misconfigured in many ways. Because the script has developed "ab initio" it is not as systematic as would be ideal, but does indeed add or remove (as appropriate) "date=" in many cases. I have added the two you mentioned. However the long term plan is to get all the appropriate tempates working with "date=", the re-factor the code. (The code has only had a couple of minor re-factors.) So if you notice any other templates where this applies, please leave a nte on my talk page, and I'll fix them up. Rich Farmbrough, 14:28 4 April 2007 (GMT).

Part 2

It's doing this sort of thing again, I'm afraid. --Mel Etitis (Talk) 11:20, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Removing underscores

The bot is removing underscores from links to articles, an while I can understand that this helps in clarity where that's actually correct, there are lots of links where underscore is correct — for example, mod_python, mod_perl, auto_ptr, etc. I am unsure about how to solve this.

Wrong summary

The edit summary on the edit at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Adjective&curid=37512&diff=120694744&oldid=120605569 doesn't reflect the actual edit. (I guess it's not a huge deal in this particular case, but still. Misleading edit summaries are bad.) —Ruakh_TALK 14:35, 6 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thanks, I spotted this and changed the summary, a short way into the run, but still worth bringing to my attention. Rich Farmbrough 22:37 6 April 2007 (UTC).

Perhaps you could have the bot remember all articles in Category:Articles with an underscore in their title, and not just fix links to those articles? -- intgr 07:03, 4 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Spectre

The page A Spectre Is Haunting Europe already went through an AfD process and survived it, as the subject is Notable, for reasons already debated and settled. I will be removing your erroneous deletion notice shortly, as there is no substance whatsoever to the claim of non-Notability. If you don't believe me, read through the article's revision history and the archived AfD page: [19].--Jeandjinni 04:13, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You're posting this on the wrong page. SmackBot didn't add that deletion notice; it merely added the "date" parameter so it would be categorized properly. —Ruakh_TALK 05:46, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Daniel Glass

Do you think that his article has now been sufficiently wikified to removoe the wikify directive that you added? --Epeefleche 20:11, 11 April 2007 (UTC) The ususal reply RF.[reply]

Dominique Peccatte

I have in the past sighted the reference in question, and it was changed by another user perhaps for grammatical reasons. Nevertheless, I have updated my revision to reflect your request. Could you please delete the > "Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since April 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements"

Thank you in advance. User:Milliot 10:10, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Dominique Peccatte - Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough 21:11 16 April 2007 (UTC).

Redoing spacing in an inappropriate manner

Diff. This one isn't serious: There is no reason to remove spacing between nav tags and categories; it just makes the code harder to read. This one is serious: It really should not be removing spacing between stub tags and whatever preceded them (usually categories, sometimes interwikis or even regular content); stub tags have a known problem that they need two blank lines between them and whatever preceded them, or they butt up against the last content in the page that preceded them when the page is rendered in the browser. Looks like crap, but WP:WSS is unlikely to fix this any time soon, since it means changing the behavior of thousands of stub templates. Example - smackbot is changing:

[[Category:Foo]]


{{foo-stub}}

to

[[Category:Foo]]


{{foo-stub}}

and this is a Bad Thing. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 14:29, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I second this; I've been somewhat annoyed by this behavior as well, but never got around to complaining about it. -- intgr 17:06, 21 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Left message with SMcC suggestig a fix to the stub templates. RF

yuppie afd

I've nominated yuppie for deletion. Please feel free to share your thoughts.--Loodog 03:48, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Defamation

it appears it is making defamatory edits.

Shutoff

Resolved

I am stopping SmackBot. It is malfunctioning, and just created a page (Improduction) with only a Wikify tag. J Milburn 17:51, 3 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, this was a recently deleted page, which should, nonetheless have not been edited. Rich Farmbrough, 17:57 3 May 2007 (GMT).

Stop messin up the dates

This robot is tagging articles with "April 2007" instead of "May 2007". Can someone work the kinks on it? See its contributions, and make it redo everything. Thanks. ~I'm anonymous

Please point out an erroneous edit; I am having a hard time finding one. -- intgr 21:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It was doing that, but was corrected some time ago. It's not worth re-doing as the membership of the April/May categories is not critical, and since the previous run was interrupted late April by a service failure, some of the articles will belong in April anyway. Rich Farmbrough 21:33 3 May 2007 (UTC).

Understood. Sorry if I caused any trouble, just pointing out that even robots make mistakes. ;} ~I'm anonymous

No problems. Rich Farmbrough, 12:25 4 May 2007 (GMT).

Daniel DiCriscio

I do not understand why this page is under scrutany when Daniel is from an historical presidential scandal with reliable news sources and is a confirmed professional in his field. We do not understand the warnings on this page. I have made minor changes to the article and there are more than enough notable sources to support this. There is a myriad of evidence to prove Daniel's notability as well. More recently there has been a celebrity scandal that we feel that maybe this is why this wikipedia page is being scrutinized. We have already sent cease and desist letters to the opposing party. If you need more proof, you can contact our attorney, Laura Claveran, her number is 562-896-0150 or e-mail her at Lclaveran@aol.com.

Two bad things

SmackBot is changing {{FixPOV}} to {{Fix|POV}}, and should not. {{FixPOV}} gives a different message and is being used intentionally to do so, and {{Fix}} is deprecated.
SmackBot is removing stub tags for no apparent reason. If the talk page has an assessment on it that still says it's a stub, then it's still a stub. If it is doing some kind of heuristic to "decide" that something isn't a stub, e.g. because it has X number of characters or Y number of sections, I would say that it needs to drop that. Stub sorting is a human activity, not a robotic one, as it calls for judgement. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 11:28, 5 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Scare Factor

I don't understand why SmackBot brought up that the article for The Scare Factor does not meet the notability guideline. The only citations that can be made for the article are of the script (which I own a copy of, and I could scan several pages off of it, but reproducing the script is illegal, even if it's just one page) and the publishing company's website, which may be out of stock for this play, and because of that it is no longer on their website. At this moment, there are no other ways to note the article. Please e-mail me if you want me to show you parts of the script at robopecan@gmail.com ColinIam 21:40, 5 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OPC

This bot changed {{Mergefrom|Oodua Republic Front}} to {{Mergefrom|Oodua Republic Front|date=May 2007} it dated it, but did not close the tag..

PREPARE FOR SPEEDY DELETION

I am the author of this page as you can see on the history... i am SHEPHERDS and i want this page to be deleted immediately. There is no such thing as Lord's Shepherds Academy. As you can see it has no reference or even a source. It is also an advertisement even so it is not true. I the creator of this page has just invented such thing like the hot fm and Lord's Shepherds Academy. Please prepare this page and also the one 91.1 Hot FM for speedy deletion. Thanks. Again I say I am the author of this page as I started it and edit all of its content and this page is just an imagination. thanks

--Shepherds 05:24, 6 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Shepherds Academy

Fact request by your bot on the Letter-spacing article

Howdy Bot, rreferences are listed under reference. Curious that the article was until last weekend filled with uncited absurd info and you did not request citation. CApitol3 12:10, 9 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 13:29 10 May 2007 (GMT).

Acceptance of IEC 61850 article

I have written this article on the iec 61850 standard & related configuration utility named SCL - Substation Configuration Language which is very much required for complete substation automation. It is an iec standard and has been in use for electrical substations. please accept the same.

Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 13:29 10 May 2007 (GMT).

Problem adding date to Ongoing template reference

SmackBot seems to have broken the {{Ongoing}} template link in this edit to the David Bain article. I don't know if this problem is more widespread. -- Avenue 11:27, 10 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks only 3 articles were affected, all fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 13:29 10 May 2007 (GMT).

Ballymcnab

Ballymacnab page. Thanks for the edit on the page.

Hello, SmackBot - at 09:50 UTC 31 May 2007 you removed the square brackets [[]] from several years in the Orbital (band) article. But the Manual of Style at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28dates_and_numbers%29#Years.2C_decades.2C_and_centuries says they should be there. Not sure if I'm misunderstanding which years should have brackets and which shouldn't? (Chorleypie 10:02, 31 May 2007 (UTC))[reply]

Regarding edits to Sylvester Stallone

Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia, SmackBot! However, your edit here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove spam from Wikipedia. If you were trying to insert a good link, please accept my creator's apologies, but note that the link you added, matching rule proboards\d{1,3}\.com, is on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. Please read Wikipedia's external links guidelines for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! Shadowbot 13:01, 24 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

LOL! This is hilarious!! —gorgan_almighty 15:11, 21 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unreferenced tag on Nationalist anarchism

The bot replaced the sources tag on this article with an unreferenced one. It isn't unreferenced (i.e. no sources), it just needs additional sources so I will be reinstating the old template. Just pointing it out in case it happens again. Gnostrat 01:06, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Edit to Radical Environmentalism

Hi. I tagged Radical environmentalism with {{Onesource}} and the bot keeps changing it to the less specific {{Refimprove|date=June 2007}} tag. I think this is a bad edit b/c it's not that the article needs only more references (which it does) but that it needs more reference and from a more diverse array of sources. Anyway, I've now changed the tag to {{Refimprove|date=June 2007}}. Hopefully this will retain the "This article or section relies largely or entirely upon a single source" tag while keeping SmackBot from changing it to less specific tag. Yilloslime 15:11, 1 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This was due to a chnage in redirects. Rich Farmbrough, 08:40 24 June 2007 (GMT).

Pogs article

The edit I made to the pogs article is legitimate. The information regarding AAFESS is a repeat of a section regarding the subject matter, and doesn't belong in the introduction section. If you actually read through the article, it makes total sense. Groink 07:23, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

SB didn't do the revert. RF

bot keeps spamming

It was dating Trivia tags which the user objected to. Rich Farmbrough 15:42 3 June 2007 (UTC).

The article...

The inserted tags are inappropriate. User:Jurriaan 13:32 10 June 2007

Please leave this article alone for a while, it is being developed. User:Jurriaan 13:34 10 June 2007

Dance Theatre

Would request you to kindly refrain from editing Dance Theatre without discussion. User: Exq bea 1:58 23 June 2007

Erm. No? Rich Farmbrough, 08:37 24 June 2007 (GMT).

Stub

Hi, I created a stub for Naomi Replansky; the bot changed an additional references tag to no references, and I'm having (possibly unrelated) trouble with the category tags. Sparafucil 09:22, 5 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The targets of thee redirects have changed. Rich Farmbrough, 10:41 5 July 2007 (GMT).

Unref

Hi, Please see:

The references are mentioned in the lists. The moth names are extracted from those references. The articles are being developed by the Indian moth endeavour, a subproject under WikiProject Lepidoptera. The editors are all well acquainted with the subject domain, one is a professional moth specialist. I do not know on what basis the bot says there are no reliable sources or references. Regards, AshLin 15:59, 9 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Reference(s)

Is making an edit just to change Reference to References really worth it? Do we have consensus that the first form is unacceptable? Haukur 21:07, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Generally these changes run at a fairly low rate, and keep the style consistant, hwever since I lost a hard drive in January, they have built up. Secondly the question of what to "bundle" into an edit is a vexed one. I have had people ask me to seperate out changes I do together, and merge those I do seperately. n the one hand, you get less edits, on the other thay are harder to "grok". On your second point, yes there is consensus that the plural should be used. Rich Farmbrough, 13:13 16 July 2007 (GMT).

Redirects

Please do not bypass redirects, like you did in [20]. See Wikipedia:Redirect#Don't fix links to redirects that aren't broken. Thank you. --NE2 01:48, 18 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hey

- - Theres a guy whose constantly adding templates of inaccuracy to the Unnithan and Valiathan article. He has refered to me as "stupid" if u see the history of the Nair article and seems to find the unnithan and valiathan references "false". Kindly deal with him because i myself seem to have broken a dozen wiki rules reverting his edits to the said articles Manu

Name

Has nothing to do with drugs, or fishing smacks. Think of it as the smack at the end of a Swedish massage, or the smack of a Homer like pate when saying Doh! Whatever makes you comfortable... The name was never intended as a reprimand, although some users have taken it as such, just a passing pun.

I see now how you intended it, but I initially took it as a reprimandish name, too. (as in "Lay the smack down") Oh well.

I took it as a reprimand too. Please change it.

Sense of humor wins. I like the name, leave it! Spazure 05:06, 22 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I am not changing the name now. Rich Farmbrough, 20:22 26 July 2007 (GMT).

Naweb

Please delete this article Nawab of Jhelum from english wikipedia. It is completly false. I belong to jhelum. Jhelum never was a princely state. and there is no such prince. It is fake article.

Thanks, but this is a bot account. Rich Farmbrough, 20:22 26 July 2007 (GMT).

Kahlid

--Khalid ---I added tags to the article, Kalid, Original research, unverified claims tag and Article Not Cited or Referenced tag. If someone references this material, whether the claims made are actually true or not, wikipedia holds the standard of verifiability over validity. Chado2423 04:53, 26 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, but this is a bot account. Rich Farmbrough, 20:22 26 July 2007 (GMT).

Iota Andromedae

I think is not correct to say that an article about a star, with five cites of star catalogs, does not cite any references. Coronellian 19:24, 28 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The usual. RF

smackbot

moo

toooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom

ello moooooooooooooooooooooo add me on runescape!! samandtom

No I Can't - Yes you Can

I cannot stop the bot; but this edit to Fourth Party System left two broken cat tags (and DEFAULTSORT probably isn't needed). Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:42, 30 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

[Tha]nks for your contribution on Gakushikai

If there is a grammatical mistake, please correct it.Tokyo Watcher

Scientific method

Why are you touching the Scientific method page right now? I can put citations for my edits, which have stood for several years. I cannot speak for the other additions, however. Ancheta Wis 17:18, 15 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The usual. RF

df Parameter

Needs to stop this. It isn't doing it right. Should be "=yes", not "=y". The error means many dates are being formatted wrong. --UpDown 19:01, 27 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Fixed. Rich Farmbrough 09:22 28 August 2007 (UTC).

Infobox changes for birth date and death date

Switching Infobox Person to use the birth date and death date templates is screwing up all the infoboxes. This is probably due to some miscoding in the templates, but let's make sure this is addressed before proceeding. Just take a look at any of the modified infoboxes to see what I mean. Also, what is the purpose of the birth date and death date templates? They seem to be completely superfluous to me, and only serve to obfuscate what should be straightforward information. Kaldari 22:24, 27 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a specific example, if you need one to look at: Russell Thorndike. Kaldari 22:27, 27 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Kaldari, fixed. Rich Farmbrough 09:22 28 August 2007 (UTC).

SmackBot problem

odd lines are being added in the infobox with the age tempates

Thanks fixed. Rich Farmbrough 09:22 28 August 2007 (UTC).

AfD nomination of Colonization of Trans-Neptunian Objects

An article that you have been involved in editing, Colonization of Trans-Neptunian Objects, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Colonization of Trans-Neptunian Objects. Thank you. Cheers, :) Dlohcierekim 21:13, 28 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

ZOMG ~~

SmackBot problem

It looks like SmackBot is adding superfluous brackets to source code while adding dates to maintenance tags. Could you look into this and try to fix it, please? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:40, 31 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem

G'day Rich,

I'd like to say "I'm sorry for stopping your bot", but that would be insincere.

Your bot keeps popping up in pages I've been working on turning USA into U.S. I think you've managed to hit about 6 of these pages in the last few days. Given how many pages there are on WP, I'm forced to congratulate you for the thoroughness of your search algorithm. But I digress.

I know this is entirely subjective opinion, but I really don't like this change. I know that what I personally like or dislike is irellevant to this discussion. The reason I'm mentioning it so you have an understanding of where I'm coming from (whether you agree with me or not). So I'll get to the point. (All right, I'll get to my point.)

When I saw the first one of these changes. I shrugged my feelings off. With the second one, I went searching and discovered that there is an unresolved WP debate about the name of the country between Mexico and Canada. I fairly quickly discovered that the "only" reason that (in the WP environment) that WP continues to refer to this country as U.S. is because opinion about whether it should be called U.S. or USA is fairly evenly split, so there is no concensus one way or the other. So, whatever happened to be there before the debate started, was left alone. I gather that "whatever happened to be there" was U.S.

So, I understand that you can use this result to justify a position that says "It should be U.S."

But, if you were to do that, my opinion is that you would be missing the point. My opinion is that the concensus is: given that there is no concensus, things should be left alone until such time as there is a concensus. I quickly and freely admit that this is (only) my opinion.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that your opinion is: there is no concensus, so the previous "official" opinion stands - this previous opinion was: "It should be U.S.", so that's what I'm going to use my bot to implement.

So, the way I see it, there are two opinions/positions:

There is no concensus - leave things alone. (a.k.a. "My opinion")
There is no concensus - the previous policy stands. Hence I'm going to use my bot to implement the previous policy. (a.k.a. "My interpretation of your opinion", which is, I guess, also my opinion!)

Now, I'm prepared to concede that I've got it completely wrong. So please, enlighten me. I'm looking forward to reading your reply. Regards, Pdfpdf 13:22, 3 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem

Bot is conflating "References" with "Footnotes". These are separate sections per WP:CITE. Please note existence of Footnotes template used at WikiProject Comics at least: here. For Footnotes, we use {{reflist}} --Tenebrae 18:00, 11 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem

Please. Again I ask: We use {{reflist}}, as per Wikipedia:Footnotes#How to use. Thanks. --Tenebrae 19:41, 11 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. Don't get me wrong. I love SmackBot, and normally find it incredibly useful and time-saving!--Tenebrae 19:43, 11 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

improper references

I'm shutting it off because further checking shows that the bot has some bugs to be worked out. Empty ref sections such as this and misformed ones like the one I refed on your talk page shouldn't be happening, the result will be work for someone to go back and fix. Please fix the bot's parameters. AKRadecki^Speaketh 20:52, 12 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Improperly removed stub notice

Just wondering why you removed the stub notice on Crocidura. The article only consists of 3 sentences so far. Kaldari 22:25, 12 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Refs

It got IPCC SPM wrong: [21] William M. Connolley 09:02, 13 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please stop spamming the gothic rock list of bands

You keep adding Freakemporium.com which is a commercial website. That is considered spam so please stop. Thank you.Crescentia 21:39, 14 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem

On Townsville Titans, SmackBot changed the unreferenced tag to refimprove. The problem is the refimprove variables are different and therefore broke it.

The tag on the article now reads "This article has been tagged since article."

Many thanks. --Breno ^talk 14:46, 15 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Woody Bay

SmackBot problem

Not sure what triggered this, but SmackBot has added Woody Bay (which is in North Devon) and Woody Bay railway station to the Somerset wikiproject. WB is only a few miles away, but it is definitely not in Somerset!

regards Lynbarn 13:40, 17 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please set minor-edit flag

I think your bot is useful but would be more so were it to set the "minor-edit" flag. Paul Beardsell 07:15, 25 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

HI Paul, happy to do so, you know you can supress bots from watchlist? Rich Farmbrough 08:18 25 September 2007 (UTC).

SmackBot problem

Notability? Oh for crying outloud! This page is as legitmate as they come. We've spent tons of time on it and plan to expand it more, but we don't have time right now to site sources.

I realize wikipedia is trying to prove it's reliability....but....

Don't you dare try to delete our page.Herbert Arthur 15:30, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I seriously do not understand what the heck is going on here.Herbert Arthur 15:30, 9 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

external link problem

The bot is changing the section title in an article with a single external link from "external link" to "external links". I have several examples, but one diff should suffice: diff. Royalbroil 02:37, 10 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

External link

I think you should stop changing "external link" where there is only one link. It's bad grammar. J 15:34, 18 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Cats and interwikis

It seems to be moving the category links to after the interwiki links, which seems unnecessary and it did not used to do this a day ago. -Wikianon 20:02, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, see article Ribosome as an example diff, and contrast with yesterday's Smackbot edit to Slobodan Jovanović which was Ok (cats remain before iw links).-Wikianon 20:05, 19 October 2007 (UTC) -edited again by me -Wikianon 20:11, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem...

Please, accept my sincere apology. Thank to User: Lynbarn, I understood that actually improper notes were added to my article by User:Carlossuarez46 and not by your SmackBot. So, again, I’m really sorry. Hopefully this will not happen again. Sincerely yours,

--Shahinaz 12:13, 22 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem

The bot is currently changing "citation needed" to "citations needed" for no apparent reason, eg at Richard Dreyfuss and Religion in Portugal. Timeineurope 22:02, 4 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks.Rich Farmbrough 22:04 4 November 2007 (UTC).

Capitalization

Hey, I was curious about this edit. Does it make any difference if the first letter of a template in capitalized? Jecowa (talk) 09:57, 5 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No it doesn't make a difference (although all the other letters are case sensative), and generally you will not see SB just making that change. It is attracted to that page beacuse it is in the category Category:Wikipedia articles needing factual verification due to this {{Who|date|November 2007}} misused template which was removed the next day . Rgds, Rich Farmbrough 10:09 5 December 2007 (UTC).

Changing "Reference" to "References" is not always good

Hi. I think that it is a great idea to standardize headings, but for stub articles with only one reference, the references section was called "Reference" because there is only one. For example, [22], [23], [24], [25], ...

There is also a problem with external link sections: [26], ...

« D Trebbien (talk) 00:53, 6 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

One more thing. Changing a "See also" section to a "Related articles" section may not be good either. Sometimes these sections contain links to external websites and these are not Wikipedia articles.

I will try to find an example of this, but maybe you, Rich, have already thought of this.

« D Trebbien (talk) 00:58, 6 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I understand, you should think of this as a standard heading like "contents". So SmackBot will make these headings plural (and correct a number of spelling errors and capitalisation errors) - per MoS [27]. Rich Farmbrough, 08:23 6 December 2007 (GMT).

Unwanted template addition

Putting in a template instead of <references/> causes additional load on servers for no benefit.--Toddy1 (talk) 13:34, 9 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem

Putting in a template instead of <references/> causes additional load on servers for no benefit.--Toddy1 (talk) 13:33, 9 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

[28] Incorrect template replacement. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 18:33, 9 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Moved inter lang wikilink to bottom of page.

SmackBot problem

It incorrectly move in text wikilink to the German wiki to the bottom of the page. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Match_Game&diff=165608062&oldid=165543740

SmackBot problem

Bot is changing external link sections to plural on pages where there is only one link. Standards should not force a pural heading where there is only a singular bullet underneath. Sorry. (example edit)- CobaltBlueTony™ _talk 20:38, 21 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Header C-c/apitalizaion

Hmmm.. I think this bot is running to take the second word of a heading and make it lower case. There's another bot running that takes the second word of a heading and makes it upper case. I don't care which way it should be, but I think you've got a bot doing some circular duty.--Paul McDonald (talk) 22:15, 28 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem

Hi Rich. Smackbot seems to be incorrectly dating maintenance tags at present. For some reason, the bot seems to think that it's still October...

Example diffs (a glance at the first page of contribs seems to indicate that SB is doing this to every article it encounters):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timbaland%27s_production_discography&diff=180847405&oldid=180846216 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Cigar_Store_Indian&diff=prev&oldid=180849067 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Chinese_Woman&diff=prev&oldid=180849052 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soviet_battlecruiser_Kirov&diff=prev&oldid=180848892 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=On_Her_Majesty%27s_Secret_Service&diff=prev&oldid=180848781

Thanks. --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 20:19, 29 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. AWB vaped my config file and I had to use a backup...From October. D'oh! Rich Farmbrough 20:22 29 December 2007 (UTC).

Is there any need to rollback the affected edits? I can help, if you like... :) --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 20:26, 29 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

thanks 'tis done. Rich Farmbrough 20:43 29 December 2007 (UTC).

Captialization error by Smackbot

In the article Charles D. Barrett, Smackbot just made an edit — 3 instances where it changed the first letter of the subject's first name to a lower case letter.[29] This is definitely an error. Please initiate whatever repairs necessary so that the bot does not uncapitalize names in article text (1 instance - in the opening words), nor in the references (2 instances). Thanks. — ERcheck (talk) 19:27, 30 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Another capitalization error

SmackBot also changed "Charles" to "charles" in the Charles H. Roadman article. [30] — ERcheck (talk) 19:58, 30 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yet another capitalization error

SmackBot again uncapitalized "Charles" in Clan Napier.[31] Seems it doesn't like "Charles" ;-) — ERcheck (talk) 20:03, 30 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

These were fixed, with thanks to user. RF.

Removing stub template

The bot removed the statistics-stub template from Minimum mean square error for some reason that is not clear to me. See [32]. --Zvika (talk) 11:24, 8 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

deletion for this

AfD nomination of Yahoo! Podcasts

An article that you have been involved in editing, Yahoo! Podcasts, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Yahoo! Podcasts. Thank you. LightSpeed3 (talk) 20:53, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Deleting content of the article

SmackBot problem

Sir, I do not understand someone is removing a part of the article. Please look into the matter. with regards

Schengen Agreement

In the article Schengen Agreement, in footnote 30, the bot changed a web reference containing underlines (“_”), deleting the underlines, and thus destroying the link. I have fixed this manually, cf. the history of the article Schengen Agreement for details. Since I think that those fixes are quite destructive, I chose to stop the bot by using this function. --DanSchultz (talk) 11:05, 1 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thans Dan, you're quite right to do so. Rich Farmbrough 12:05 1 February 2008 (UTC).

I am stopping the bot because:

It says the entry I wrote is not verifiable. But the link I have provided takes one to the web-published sound file which I describe. There are additionally almost 500 Google search hits which describe this work(http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22john+Oswald%22+%2Bburrows&hl=en&safe=off&start=10&sa=N), including descriptions by John Oswald on the home page which publishes the piece (http://www.pfony.com/) and in his Tate Modern on-line forum (www.tate.org.uk/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2471). The same work is published on CD by Cambridge Street Records: http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/cd8.html.

This has nothing to do with SmackBot. I tagged a citation [33] and all SmackBot did was dating it.[34] PrimeHunter (talk) 22:04, 5 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem - deleted template tag

Smackbot deleted a {{australia-geo-stub}} tag when adding dates to maintenance tags. An example from Freshwater Beach today. JackSchmidt (talk) 06:32, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another example from Feist (dog). JackSchmidt (talk) 07:55, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Another example from Mother Courage JackSchmidt (talk) 08:03, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a stub where the problem did NOT occur: non-example at Franny Armstrong. JackSchmidt (talk) 08:03, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Still deleting templates. Please stop this dangerous bot until it is fixed! JackSchmidt (talk) 09:29, 18 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
example from Freshwater Beach today. JackSchmidt (talk) 06:32, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
example from Feist (dog). JackSchmidt (talk) 07:55, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
example from Mother Courage JackSchmidt (talk) 08:03, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
non-example at Franny Armstrong. JackSchmidt (talk) 08:03, 7 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

HI Jack, thanks for your notes. The removal of stub-templates is part of the AWB framework and is based on article length and possibly other factors. Neither of the articles Mother Courage and Feist are stubs, so it seems that AWB is working correctly here. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 09:31 18 February 2008 (GMT).

(Posted in response to a note on my talk page, while Jack was posting the above. RF)

Orphaned Article

Hello,

I have added quite a few links to articles you have marked "This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it." such as Eugene Sartory Can you possibly take down those tags? Thank you in advance Milliot (talk)

AOUTP Rich Farmbrough, 09:46 18 February 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot problem

problem with Edmund Wilson page. Bot had gone berserk. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:51, 18 February 2008 (UTC).[reply]

These are the bot's changes. Regards, Rich Farmbrough 09:14 18 February 2008 (UTC).

I made an entry listing the superdelegates from Washington. It is legitimate.

I think this is the link you are looking for:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Washington_State_Democratic_Party&oldid=190652973

Thanks Rich...

PS, I am just getting started with being a wiki editor...

BradClure

Usual msg left. RF.

psychohistory

I had to revert the bot's </ref> since it messed up all the graphics in that page. Please take care of such actions. —Cesar Tort 17:18, 12 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am repeating here what I just wrote in talk page: the bot corrupted the graphic in psychohistory. I reverted it. —Cesar Tort 17:20, 12 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

THe problem was with a broken (unterminated) ref. Rich Farmbrough 18:20 12 March 2008 (UTC).

Pipe changed to 2.

[35] -- Jeandré, 2008-03-15t20:12

Thanks. Fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 20:17 15 March 2008 (GMT).

Pickled eggs

The bot seems to be unnecessarily changing capitalization on maintenance tags. For instance, it edited Pickled egg to change {{fact|Date=March 2008}} to {{Fact|date=March 2008}}. This doesn't seem to have any affect on the tag.-Tomdobb (talk) 12:59, 20 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your note. The important change is not fact=>Fact but Date=>date. With "Date" the template won't work. Rich Farmbrough, 13:25 20 March 2008 (GMT).

I am stopping the bot because

The bot seems to tag things unecessarily, such as the example posted above, except now it's doing it in Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. The concern behind this is that it is cluttering the Edit History, which makes it hard to track the history of the page overall/in general. Hope I've made a decent justification. Neil the Cellist (talk) 18:20, 23 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Myah OS

This bot is putting incorrect information on my page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeremiah Cheatham (talk • contribs)

Tone

Smackbot seems to have placed an "inappropriate tone" label on this page which I think is not correct. I edited it out but it's still appearing there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_arms

Usual RF

Position of references

I see SmackBot has been adding a "References" section to some Indiana geographic articles that needed them, as well as reordering some other elements. However, in the case of many stubs (such as those for the Indiana towns of China, Egypt, and many others) this results in the references section being put after the county's navigational box, which looks rather odd. For consistency with other articles, the references section should probably be up in the body with the other sections, and not separated from them by the template. Huwmanbeing ☀★ 21:07, 4 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

bot is changing image names that I don't want changed

Hi -- Your bot has been visiting many pages that i have on my watchlist. Among other things it is changing image names, such as in this change: diff on Iowa page

It also added a reference section, which is okay to do. But what i don't like is that it changed image names that include spaces, to drop the underline characters in the image name. That is how I deliberately enter image names, including the underline characters rather than spaces, so as to avoid editing problems. I want the image name to be an entire block that is clearly an image name, not a caption that can be edited. I consider your bot, stripping out the underlines, to be unhelpful, so, per your instructions I am stopping it and leaving this note.

Sincerely, Doncram

Hi, you are replacing the template {{inline}} with {{Citations missing}} - for example at Trace fossil. The templates are not the same; indeed the wording is very different. Could you keep the original template in place, please?

All the best

Verisimilus T 16:33, 25 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, fixed. Up to 10 April they were the same template. Rich Farmbrough 17:35 25 April 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot problem

The article on local finiteness. Why have you changed it?

Topology Expert (talk) 09:23, 5 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I am stopping the bot because:

Seems to be adding extra brackets when dating tags. Here's one [example], but there are plenty more. - MrOllie (talk) 21:36, 31 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thanks. Got it. Rich Farmbrough 21:40 31 May 2008 (UTC).

BRB

I think I accidently clicked the red button - sorry. -blammo77 NP.Rich Farmbrough, 23:37 20 August 2008 (GMT).

SmackBot problem

Please see this edit: [36] --SJK (talk) 01:53, 15 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of stub-sorting tags?

Hi, not sure why SmackBot would remove three valid stub-sorting tags as it did to Pink Saturday, in this edit. Is there a rule about too many stub types (in which case at least one or more valid ones should be left)? I checked on those stub types as well, and they do not seem to be deprecated. Please advise. Thanks and keep up the good work, MCB (talk) 03:48, 26 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Basically WP:AWB removes stub tags from articles over a certain size. Rich Farmbrough, 09:18 26 June 2008 (GMT).

Addition of date to trivia tag

Please explain to me your rationale of an additon of a date to the trivia tag on Bob Rogers (disc jockey) when a trivia section does not exist there any longer?BringItOn TheAteam (talk) 04:07, 26 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The bot cannot distinguish the presense or absence of such sections, dating the tag means it should get dealt with at some point, even if merely to delete it. Rich Farmbrough, 09:18 26 June 2008 (GMT).

Well, I put it to you that your modus operandi is obviously faulty and questionable is similar cases such as this and is open to challenges on a regular basis. What you should have done was to remove the tag entirely. Is your advanced "bot" capable of doing that at least? Or is too difficult for you?BringItOn TheAteam (talk) 10:11, 26 June 2008 (UTC) Removing my above reply speaks volumes of your attitude. Volumes.BringItOn TheAteam (talk) 10:11, 26 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

SmackBot problem

Why is </br> tag not allowed in article? --Ramu50 (talk) 17:56, 29 July 2008 (U

Hi,

I have carried out necessary changes in the article Clarion Technologies Pvt. Ltd.. I have corrected the grammatical errors, (which were not made by me) and also worked on style and tone. Please reconsider the changes and do not delete it. I will be grateful if you could remove the attached to it. If possible for you, will you please let me know if the page can be locked for editing?

Thanking you,

--Greatfulreaderr (talk) 07:26, 8 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Problem....?

if you are the one who made the Jennette McCurdy articl dont you think you should put a picture of her on the articl? this is just a request ~ avatar aang of the southern air temple

Dating afd-mergeto

Smackbot dated {{afd-mergeto}} on Talk:Storage condo, which screwed up the way the template displayed. See the bad version. Hope this helps! —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 13:42, 17 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Bad edit

Hi SmackBot. I just reverted one of your edits. It's quite a big buggy diff so here's the history and here's the diff. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 11:34, 19 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Spacing in headers

More of a query than a direct complaint: give that WP:HEAD explicitly says that spaces between the equals signs and the heading name are optional, and a blank line below the heading is optional, why is SmackBot removing these? Seems like unnecessary work, and IMHO the spaces make things more readable in the edit window. —Quasirandom (talk) 00:40, 25 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Just somthing I was trying out, I have to remove it regardless, becasue I only want to save pages where I'm actually dating a tag. Thanks for your note. Rich Farmbrough 01:08 25 August 2008 (UTC).

SmackBot problem

Please don't add reference sections when they already exist. Kbrose (talk) 19:09, 30 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. Rich Farmbrough 19:57 30 August 2008 (UTC).