User talk:Mikaey/Archives/2018/March

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Bots Newsletter, March 2018

Bots Newsletter, March 2018

Greetings!

Here is the 5th issue of the Bots Newsletter (formerly the BAG Newletter). You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list.

Highlights for this newsletter include:

ARBCOM

Magioladitis 2 happened, leading to further restrictions on Magioladitis (decision, summary).
Betacommand 3 was proposed to be amended to lift the indefinite ban on Δ, but was unsuccessful (decision).
A motion concerning Crosswiki issues (mostly concerning Wikidata) was passed (see discussion).

BAG

Hersfold was removed from the BAG due to long term inactivity.

BRFAs

We currently have 6 open bot requests at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval, and could use your help processing!

Discussions

While there were no large-scale bot-related discussion in the past few months, you can check WP:BOTN and WT:BOTPOL (and their corresponding archives) for smaller issues that came up.

New things

WP:BOTDICT, a dictionary of common bot-related terms (see discussion).
6 inactive bots have been deflagged (see discussion).
The 2017 Community Wishlist Survey happened. Two bot-related proposal passed, #6 deploy Article Alerts to other languages and #10 Commons deletion notification bot, although other entries may affect bots as well.
Category:Wikipedia bots and its subcategories has had some cleanup. Bot-related pages that were historically important but are no longer of interests can be found in Category:Wikipedia bots (historical)
The edit summary limit has been increased to 1000 characters (see T6715). If a bot you operate relied on the old truncation limit (255 characters), please review/update your code, as overly long summaries can be disruptive/annoying. If you want to use extra characters to have more information in your edit summary, please do so intelligently.
You will soon be able to ping users from the edit summary (see T188469). If you wish to use this feature in your bot, please do so intelligently.

Upcoming

HTML Tidy will be phased out in June 2018, or possibly earlier. This may affect some bots (see FAQ).

Thank you! edited by: Headbomb 03:11, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

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User:AarghBot

Please again start running your bot User:AarghBot, because it was very useful finding which pages needed history-merging in the Wikipedia:WikiProject History Merge project. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 21:40, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
- I'll see what I can do. :-) Mikaey, Devil's advocate 21:52, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 23:26, 7 February 2018 (UTC)
As a follow-up: the bot has been running continuously since Feb 16th, and it's only 5.8% done so far. Wheee! Mikaey, Devil's advocate 05:05, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Hi! Delighted to just notice you had done some recent hist-merges in Special:Log/merge, and then to find your bot was updating these reports again. Welcome back! wbm1058 (talk) 15:19, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Listas bots

Hi, I was referred to you by Schwede66, who left a note on my talk page informing me that you had once operated a bot to handle listas parameters for biographical articles. I've been working on cutting down the backlog, which was at 39K when I started back in January and is now down to 28K. I don't know much about bots, but I would be interested to know if your bot could be pressed into service again to help shrink the backlog. Lepricavark (talk) 18:28, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Eep, I'd have to think about that. I'm not even sure I have the code for ListasBot around anymore...and if I do, I'd probably have to do some work on it and resubmit it to BRFA. Can you elaborate on what needs to be done? E.g., do we just need to update the listas tags on {{WPBiography}} templates?

We just need to fill-in missing listas parameters on talk pages of biography articles. However, I don't want to inconvenience you and it's not an urgent matter. Lepricavark (talk) 02:21, 15 March 2018 (UTC)