Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/William Avery Bot 5

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard. The result of the discussion was Request Expired.

William Avery Bot 5

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Operator: William Avery (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 18:08, Friday, September 2, 2022 (UTC)

Function overview: A template, {{plain row headers}}, will be placed immediately before every table that currently uses "plain row headers" styling. The name of the CSS class used to achieve the plain row headers styling will be changed from "plainrowheaders" to "plain-row-headers". If a table has the "plainrowheaders" CSS class, but contains no row headers to be thus styled, the "plainrowheaders" CSS class will be removed from the table.

For background to this, and the motivation, see Wikipedia:TemplateStyles.

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): Python

Source code available: pywikibot script plainrowheaders.py

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

• Requested at WP:BOTREQ § TemplateStyles for plainrowheaders by User: Izno

For background see:

• MediaWiki talk:Common.css/to do § description

Edit period(s): Total edit time will be in the region of 9 days(~ 125,000 articles ÷ 600 edits per minute ÷ 24 hours a day), but will occur over a longer period than that. My plan is to concentrate on individual, heavily affected, subject areas in turn. Music, films, TV, theatre, sports, lists of historic buildings and species are areas where much data is tabulated in articles. I intend to do trials in each area before running batches of ~10,000 articles. This should also help shorten any period of watchlist disruption for individual editors down to a day or two.

After the initial processing, there will need to be further runs on a smaller scale, as editors will still be using the current construct, and pages may have been deep reverted for reasons unrelated to this processing.

Estimated number of pages affected: 125,000 per this search. Obviously there are very few pages with the {{plain row headers}} template in place as yet.

Namespace(s): Mainspace/Articles

Exclusion compliant: Yes, per pywikibot

Function details: Each table in the page is processed. This only applies to tables started with {|, not templates that output tables.

If the class attribute of the table contains the class name "plainrowheaders", that classname is replaced with "plain-row-headers".

If the table's class attribute now contains "plain-row-headers", several successive steps are taken to discover whether the table in fact makes use of the class, and therefore requires the {{plain row headers}} template.

1. Each table header in the table, as parsed by mwparserfromhell, is examined for table headers with "scope=row".
2. Table headers that start e.g. !scope=row{{Some template| may also be present. mwparserfromhell doesn't see the attribute because there is no following pipe. A regular expression can detect these, and output a warning with the name of the template. (Usually the template should be being invoked with a parameter such as "rowheader=true", rather than used in such a fashion.)
3. The table body markup may contain a template that is known to emit table headers with "scope=row", such as {{Single chart}}. These can be tested for with a regular expression. Some of these templates, such as {{Episode list}}, are intended for use within templates that emit a whole table, but they turn up in plain tables.
4. If the markup of the table body looks like it contains templates (i.e. includes "{{"), the templates can be subst'ed and the resultant markup reparsed, as at step one. In practice this is only necessary for relatively few of the tables.

Each table using plain row header styling should be preceded by its own {{plain row headers}}, so the processing keeps track of whether such a template has been encountered since the last table. It assumes hat any such template is the one that belongs to the current table.

If no table header cells with scope=row were found or the "wikitable" class name is not among the table's classes, the "plain-row-headers" class is not producing any effect, and is removed from the table. Otherwise, if none is present, the styling template {{plain row headers}} is inserted before the table.

Care has been taken to ensure that if the processing is run for a second time on a page that has already been processed, it makes no changes.

To simplify checking, no standard fixes or cosmetic code changes are included.

Test edits have been carried out in the bot's userspace. e.g. here and here.

Division of work into batches

I use my own extension of the pywikibot.pagegenerators module, which can generate lists of pages to be processed from a custom database table, in this case prh_batch. I can populate this table using prh_batch.py. The search needs to be divided into slices because there is a limit of 10,000 on results. Once the list of pages is in the database table I can run queries against the enwiki_p database replica to assign them to Wikiprojects.

Discussion

Given the documented caveat that the ability to affect page content outside the template should not be relied on, I do not think this task should proceed. — JJMC89 (T·C) 01:19, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Right, I thought that would be discussed, hence why I added The wider community was notified and nothing of interest was discussed. In other discussion from the content transform team members, the HTML emitted does not make this an issue. to the documentation of the template. Absolute crickets on the task of interest (phab:T176272) where I made clear what I intended. When I reviewed the background of why that caveat is there, it was more of a "wait and see" than the wording implies on that template. See the revision after the one you linked to (why did you add it as a permalink excluding that revision?) which points to phab:T155813#3037085 and related discussion.

Separately, the discussion there about scoped CSS is more or less irrelevant today and barely relevant when it was first discussed as some sort of thing that would be beneficial for VE. Though it seems to be making a comeback on the design side finally ([1]), it's been practically dead since around the time TemplateStyles was first discussed. Even then, it doesn't seem like a valuable restriction for end-users like us -- it was proposed entirely as a convenience for VE, and TBH looking at what it was suggested for in that context I don't think it's all that pertinent there either.

To go a step further, there is a template (er, templates) that does similar today though at much smaller scale for this exact use case, which is Template:Import-blanktable/Template:Row hover highlight (~600 uses). Which, coincidentally, was recommended for use by one of the engineers who participated in the RFC linked above for how TemplateStyles would work.

At worst, we have to go through N number of articles to remove this in the future if it completely breaks VE or some other system at some arbitrary time in the future, or WMF can't somehow work around it. Izno (talk) 02:41, 3 September 2022 (UTC)

Against, You can realize your idea simple and fast with CSS formula (as global.css for this local wikipedia or in the software WikiMedia):

th[scope="row"] {
	font-weight: normal;
}

✍️ Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 10:47, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

Not relevant. This is a case where we are trying to move what is in MediaWiki:Common.css to WP:TemplateStyles. Izno (talk) 22:50, 28 September 2022 (UTC)

{{BAG assistance needed}} User:Izno, who requested this task, has expressed a concern on the noticeboard at the length of time that this request has gone without attention from a BAG member, and a willingness to provide any further input required here. I am therefore requesting BAG assistance. William Avery (talk) 18:17, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

References

Needs wider discussion. Per WP:BOTREQUIRE#4, please show broader consensus to perform this task and perform this task by bot at large scale. I do not see any immediate discussion that involves uninvolved editors expressing support or opposition to this task. I see a lot of technical details, work steps, todo lists, and work progress notifications, etc. concentrated on technical pages. Being (as far as I know) the first time a bot is "implementing" TemplateStyles this way places this BRFA as a precedent and puts an even larger onus on BAG to establish a clear consensus for the task. I see general support for enabling and careful use of TemplateStyles as a whole. I see general support for making a guideline. Since then it has been expanded to discuss a case like this with tables, although I don't see any direct discussion. It has also been expanded to include even more workflow for conversion, which is again a "how to" rather than "should". So, as far as I can locate previous discussions I can link to and understand the intent here, this task takes it several steps further from previous explicit consensus - it (1) styles outside its template (i.e. not "only style the associated template's output"), (2) styles tables (i.e. not "a specific template or group of templates"), (3) does this on a case-by-case basis (i.e. only tables that are manually and specifically classes "plainrowheaders") and (4) automates the process (i.e. currently, only this BRFA itself, which besides the proposer and implementer has 2 editors opposing based on arguments with sufficient merit to consider). I'm sure I'm grossly oversimplifying, but that's kind of the point - consensus should be clear and I shouldn't need to dig this deep to understand if the task is appropriate during WP:BOTAPPROVAL. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 19:38, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

@Hellknowz Ok. Do you have a recommendation on where? I am inclined to WP:VPT or WT:TemplateStyles but if you think this should be done at WP:VPPRO, I can take it there.

You really did go down a rabbit hole there though. Anyway, the below is for your edification:

Regarding item 3 in that list; if it were all <table>s then MediaWiki:Common.css would be the correct home for it (which is where the relevant CSS lives today, and in MediaWiki:Mobile.css, but I think that is an artifact of when plainrowheaders was added vice when TemplateStyles was added and not any other reason). Regarding item 4 in that list, it is infeasible to do the change relevant to this BRFA any other way (well, I could do it in AWB but it would take a while and be more likely to cause errors). Regarding 2 editors opposing based on arguments with sufficient merit to consider, the latter editor's comment has 0 relevance in that it's basically like "you can put it in Common.css"... which is where it is today and which is sufficiently answered by MediaWiki talk:Common.css/to do#description.

I think item 2 of your list also isn't interesting as this is not a new addition of course, it is moving CSS from place X to place Y. And has existing precedent already in the form of a much lesser-used template.

Again, strictly for edification. I await your recommendation. :) Izno (talk) 02:54, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

@Izno: I guess any VP discussion would probably be sufficient. If you want to future-proof it with an RfC or something, that's cool. It really is up to you guys - I (or, technically, you) just need a discussion or guideline/policy we can point to and say - here is consensus for this task. Also, can I strongly suggest a couple examples of exactly what the changes will look like so that no one has to guess what all these technical things mean.

Thanks for clarifying on the various points. As you can probably tell, I didn't try to conclude whether any of these points are actually fulfilled. To be clear, these are not necessarily problems, these are just questions about the scope of the task where I cannot find clear consensus (or at least an obvious answer). It's more to give you an indication of what I saw as an outside observer and what someone else may or may not support or oppose or disregard. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 11:01, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

@William Avery: Marking this {{BotOnHold}}, as it's been 7 months since you've posted here. GoingBatty (talk) 03:25, 28 May 2023 (UTC) Request Expired. Nine months since the operator has edited Wikipedia. No prejudice against re-opening if/when they return. Primefac (talk) 10:05, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard.