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DYKCheck

I recently had an encounter with a DYK reviewer who is having a hard time understanding DYK policy in regaurds to reviewing hooks where the editor started an article in user space and then moved it into article space. He/she doesn't seem to be grasping how to determine how old the article is, and they refused to believe the article shouldn't be rejected after several other reviewers, including myself, pointed out the relevent policies. Anyway, the article in question has since been promoted so that is not an issue. Howeverm this editor is still confused. I thought you might be able to explain DYKCheck better than me at User talk:Philcha#DYKcheck. Thanks for any help you can give in advance. Best, 4meter4 (talk) 11:04, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

I've been swamped by other things for the last week, and I apologize for the late reply. The discussion there seems to have died down, so I'll reply here. A few things:

• The tone in that discussion was quite unhealthy (this isn't directed at anyone in particular). Continuing the discussion seemed to be getting everyone more worked up.
• There are a lot of boxes to check when reviewing DYKs. This comes naturally for DYK regulars, but isn't so easy for those reviewing for the first few times. Incidentally, this is why I made DYKcheck; to reduce the tedious aspects of reviewing.
• I agree with Philcha that the documentation for DYK isn't great. In the past we've made efforts to simplify the submission process and make it more understandable, but we've yet to do that for the reviewing side of things. DYK as a whole should be open to feedback.
• DYKcheck is a tool, and should not replace human judgment. Therefore, reviewers using it should be able to manually verify that DYKcheck's output is correct (or incorrect). Which leads into my next point...
• The Wikimedia software itself has its own quirks. A normal person would expect this page to contain something if in fact a move had taken place. What isn't obvious is that the moves only show up on the log of the "from" title, and don't show up on the "target" title log. You can search through the normal edit history on the target page for an edit summary like "moved <from title> to <target title>", but again, this isn't obvious to the normal user (this is how DYKcheck finds moves by the way). (And I notice that no one pointed out these subtleties to Philcha.)
• I will expand the "Using DYKcheck" on DYKcheck's documentation page to try to address Philcha's issues with using the script (when I find some time to breathe). I'm always open to feedback/criticism/rants/raves on anything I've worked on.

Shubinator (talk) 23:35, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Who gets the credit, how does it work?

As the creator of the article Titanomyrma, which is now on the main page, I would've like to have been told. When I come to Wikipedia, I go to my watchlist which I bookmarked, and not the main page, so I would've have noticed except I have someone else's talk page on my watchlist. I notice that at least two people who worked on the article got a message. Shouldn't the article's creator get it as well? Or was there an error since someone renamed it from my original Titanomyrma lubei to its current shorter title of Titanomyrma? Is that a bug? Dream Focus 19:59, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

You have Titanomyrma watchlisted, right? This edit should have shown up on your watchlist. As for the user talk page notices, those are determined by whoever nominated the article for DYK, at the time they nominate the article for DYK. In this case, these edits show the {{DYKmake}} templates being added to the nomination. The bot simply follows these templates. So no, it's not a bug.

As to the separate question of whether you should receive credit, this case is ambiguous. The nominator was nominating for DYK on the basis of expansion, not creation. However, it would have been courteous of the nominator to include you in the credits. Shubinator (talk) 20:12, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

DYK fix

Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#Local_time_updates got ignored and you may be able to help.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 14:58, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Replied there. Shubinator (talk) 17:52, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

DYKHousekeepingBot disabled?

Did something happen to this bot? It hasn't made any updates in about 18 hours. OCNative (talk) 12:06, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Looks like it was having connectivity issues. I've restarted it. Thanks for the notice! Shubinator (talk) 13:39, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Brilliant bot-maker advice sought

Could you please take a look at Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#What_should_happen_before_a_brilliant_bot-maker_does_this.3F and give some advice? There seems to be consensus that it would be good to have a bot-notification to the article talk page triggered at the time somebody nominates the article for DYK. Nobody objected to the simple wording I proposed, which is of course based on your earlier work:

"This article Name of Article has been nominated to be linked to from Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column using the hook "Did you know ... text of hook proposed?" The DYK discussion will be here (a link to article's discussion at DYK)."

I hope this proposal meets with your approval and that you can suggest a way to implement it. Thanks for your work on the DYKUpdateBot! betsythedevine (talk) 14:21, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Replied there. I've been meaning to comment on that discussion for more than a week now, but my free time has been very patchy; sorry. Shubinator (talk) 19:07, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

And now I've replied there with a possible codable-solution to issues you raised. Thanks again for thinking about this! betsythedevine (talk) 06:46, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks

...for the support. Haven't seen you in a while (but I think of you every time I remove the stub template from a DYK-nominated article) but I see you're still plugging along. Thanks again, and see you around, Drmies (talk) 14:45, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

No problem :) Yep, I'm still chugging along. I keep thinking that in a few months I'll have more free time, but for some reason that "more free time" never appears. Never fear though, you'll have to put up with me a while longer :) Shubinator (talk) 19:10, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

DYN

Hi, How about linking the word refah in the Did you know section (30 May) to the page Refah tragedy ? Cheers. Nedim Ardoğa (talk) 10:32, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Looks like this is already off the Main Page. Also, I agree with the way the article was linked; since the article is about a specific event and not the boat itself, the wikilink on the verb is more appropriate than a wikilink on the boat. Shubinator (talk) 15:31, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Note

Once you're on-line, have a look here [1]. I had no time at all to investigate this, but there is something odd with {{Did you know/Next update}} redirecting to prep1. Maybe I should change that redirect instead of reverting Edokter. Or maybe this is somehow related to the preview of the "next day main page" with prep1 in it (handy when composing the set). Materialscientist (talk) 07:10, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

It's a remnant of when the preps were Next update and Next Next update, which itself is a remnant of a time before DYKUpdateBot and DYKadminBot. (If you're curious, the discussions to change the names are here and here.) I'm tempted to leave the redirect as-is since a lot of stuff used /Next update in the past. However, tweaking the redirect to point to the next queue (if templates are allowed within redirects) also isn't a bad idea. Shubinator (talk) 14:49, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of File:Coccolithovirus.jpg

A tag has been placed on File:Coccolithovirus.jpg requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section F2 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is an image page for a missing or corrupt image or an empty image description page for a Commons-hosted image.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, contest the deletion by clicking on the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion," which appears inside of the speedy deletion ({{db-...}}) tag (if no such tag exists, the page is no longer a speedy delete candidate). Doing so will take you to the talk page where you will find a pre-formatted place for you to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. You can also visit the the page's talk page directly to give your reasons, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Sfan00 IMG (talk) 12:47, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Just in case you're wondering: the file was featured in 2006. It had no proper license, but was moved to commons, and thus deleted on en.wiki in 2007, and then deleted on Commons, in 2011. Thus it appears as an empty tagged file, but the tagging was done in 2009, when the file was alive. Materialscientist (talk) 13:07, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, it's an unfortunate side-effect of the way we do file tagging: if/when the file on Commons is deleted, the tag on enwiki needs to be manually cleaned up. Shubinator (talk) 06:56, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

DYK thoughts

Hi Shub. I just wanted to take one more stab at my idea for a DYK bot that supports AfD-style nominations before I retire it. I hope you'll indulge me! Here's what I had envisioned this bot doing:

• Checks T:TDYK for new sections that resemble the results of a {{subst:NewDYKnom}} transclusion
• For each one it finds, it:
  • creates a new page of the form Template talk:Did you know/Article create date/Article1 name
  • moves the contents of the T:DYK section to this page, and adds a link to watchlist that page just beneath the section header
  • it replaces the section on the T:DYK page with a transclusion of the subpage

The nice things about doing it this way are:

• It requires no additional part on the work of the nominator (or anyone else).
• It requires no changes to the "how to nominate" documentation.
• It requires only minimal changes to the way queues are promoted: the hook (and image, credits, etc) are copied from the subpage, and the transclusion of the subpage is removed from T:DYK.
• If the bot stops working, there's essentially no harm to the DYK process; nominators continue to add nominations the same way, and reviewers continue to click the edit button and add their comments. Only the watchlisting function will be offline, and only people promoting the hooks to prep will need to do anything differently, and only then if the bot's not back up by the time the hook's approved.

To be clear, I'm not volunteering you for any work; I'm happy to write this bot myself now that my bot is up and running and behaving like it should. I just wanted to run this by you, rather than everyone on WT:DYK, since you're the expert. If you think it's unworkable or otherwise a bad idea, I promise not to be offended, and will drop it; I just wanted to put down my thoughts while they were still fresh in my mind. Thanks, 28bytes (talk) 19:35, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't see any need for a bot. If we decide to go with AfD-style transclusions, updating the instructions for nominating is trivial, and unlike a bot it wouldn't require additional maintenance or a BRFA. Simply having people directly post their nominations to the proper subpage (basically what is already done for AfD, MfD, FA, and PR nominations) would be much simpler than writing a bot to do it. rʨanaɢ (talk) 19:59, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it's unworkable or a terrible idea, but I do feel there isn't much to be gained. The cons:

• The closer a bot interacts with everyday users, the more often it'll go down/crash. This is why making DYKUpdateBot was relatively easy; its input has already been screened by admins, compared to DYKcheck, which has to anticipate all sorts of hare-brained users (one reason why I haven't bot-ified DYKcheck).
• A small but not insignificant number of DYK regulars don't use {{NewDYKNom}}, which makes coding the bot harder.
• We're adding dependencies. On the Toolserver, on Wikipedia's APIs, etc. Disruptions in the dependencies ripple across to the bot. (For example, toolserver maintenance periods and changes to the API (API changes are decently rare but can have far-reaching consequences...a while back they went from 1-step login to 2-step login, which killed the old DYKadminBot).)
• T:TDYK is one of the most-edited pages on English Wikipedia (and therefore, on any Wikipedia). The bot will have to know edit conflicts like the back of its hand (assuming it has a hand, but you get my point :) ).
• My philosophy with bots is that they shouldn't be irreplaceable, so that if/when all bots disappear, things will still run. Maybe not well, but the system will still work. I love that DYKUpdateBot has been stable for over a year, but at the same time I wonder how many currently active DYK admins could perform a full update (can you?). (And I realize this is a philosophical point and nearly impossible to address.)

Most of my concerns are with building a sturdy bot in the first place, and then actively maintaining the bot. If you're willing to put in the effort, go for it. Shubinator (talk) 06:22, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

All reasonable concerns. I won't push for a bot, then, and will just stand by to help in case one is wanted. (And I think I know how to do the update manually, but only because I've looked at DYKUpdateBot's contribs.) 28bytes (talk) 16:45, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

K. Making your current bot bulletproof will give you more experience if/when it's needed. Implementing DYKHousekeepingBot helped me understand some of the API's idiosyncrasies before DYKUpdateBot came along (not to mention it gave me a nice head start on code). Granted, the python bot libraries are more mature than the java ones, so you'll probably have fewer issues to deal with. (That's the best place to start. I learned the DYK update process by looking at DYKadminBot's contribs, and when it was malfunctioning, figuring out what it missed. Even today DYKadminBot and DYKUpdateBot have a similar "feel".) Shubinator (talk) 06:27, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thinking some more about this, perhaps a bot that could help but wouldn't "get in the way" would be one that maintains a new page that lists only unreviewed nominations? In other words Template talk:Did you know/unreviewed would be updated every hour or so to transclude all of the T:TDYK subpages that contain only the nomination and no other editors' comments? I occasionally see comments from nominators saying they can't find any unreviewed ones, maybe this would help. It wouldn't edit T:TDYK, just read it. What do you think? 28bytes (talk) 20:35, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Sure. It'll be much easier to code, and you won't have to worry about things like edit conflicts. And if the bot is down it won't affect the main DYK process. Shubinator (talk) 17:17, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Shubinator, your efforts are very much appreciated. I didn't know about them until now, as I'm relatively new to DYK reviewing. Please let me know if you have any ideas/advice on how to make the noms watchlistable. Cheers. Tony (talk) 15:53, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Good to hear. The transcluded noms idea seems like it's been discussed enough, and is now waiting for someone to implement it. It's theoretically not too complex (and perhaps this is what you meant by your comment on WT:DYK...to be clear, even the theoretically simplest of ideas takes a decent amount of sweat to make a reality), so someone should take the initiative and do it. (And I note rjanag and cmadler have both made prototypes, so it looks like it's rolling along.) Shubinator (talk) 06:35, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Excellent; thanks, Subinator. Tony (talk) 10:09, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi Shubinator, the latest about the DYK restructuring is at WT:DYK#Something new, and I'm soliciting people's comments at WP:DYK#New nomination setup. If you have time, it would be nice if you could comment on whether either my or Cmadler's proposal will be easier or more difficult for DYKcheck to handle. Best, rʨanaɢ (talk) 19:00, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Replied there. Shubinator (talk) 17:27, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. One more quick question: will the bot still be able to get the info it needs for Wikipedia:Did you know/DYK hook count under the new system? I can partially replicate it using categories in the subpages (e.g., "Category:Pending DYK nominations from 2011 July 4", etc.), but that wouldn't be able to replace things the bot does like counting the verified vs. unverified noms and organizing them into the table. rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:32, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

No, the core of DYKHousekeepingBot will have to be rewritten, either to parse HTML, or traverse the transclusions. Shouldn't be too hard to do. Next two weekends look especially busy for me though. Shubinator (talk) 06:28, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Ah, no worries. I don't think it's urgent, I'm sure they can survive without the hook count for a few weeks (and I doubt they'll be ready to start using the new setup that soon anyway). In the interim, I can use categories to give them a rough hook count. rʨanaɢ (talk) 06:34, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. The date/time of the switch should be advertised for a day or two before it actually happens; for one, it gives me time to turn off DYKHousekeepingBot (I believe it would fill the table with 0's if left on). Shubinator (talk) 06:38, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Bot staled

Check'em if you're around. I've reset the queue for the next update to start at 00:00 UTC 30 June - just got online. Materialscientist (talk) 23:01, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

*facepalm* Classic null pointer exception. Bot reset. Looking into the best way of revising the code. Shubinator (talk) 05:38, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Code fixed. Since this is a decently major bug I've pushed the update to the live code as well. I'll be asleep for the next update, but I'll check on everything in the morning. Shubinator (talk) 06:04, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll monitor the next update, but not the update after. (I have developed a worrying tendency to remove the <!--Hooks--> tag. This cost us one missing update when I was offline. :).

Excellent. (Eh, we all have our not-so-bright moments. I'm still marveling at that null pointer...) Shubinator (talk) 06:14, 30 June 2011 (UTC)