User talk:Robbot

Contents

1 Disambiguation of Denaturation

2 Other Stuff

3 Hungarian language

4 Absolutism

5 Stop Robbot!

6 Exclusion list

7 Cats go below interwiki?

8 Why Robbot, why?

9 Czech characters

10 Change links to comments?

11 Japanese characters in Haydn's 104th symphony--why remove link?

12 Broken bot?

13 Interwiki link deletion

14 Please do NOT substitute redirections!

Disambiguation of Denaturation

I've created a disambiguation page for denaturation, and am wanting to have the articles linking to it relinked to the correct pages. Thankfully, all but a few articles meant to link to the biochemical definition. I have relinked the articles that do not link to the page Denaturation (Biochemistry), so all remaining articles linking to Denaturation should be relinked to Denaturation (Biochemistry). Could you please use Robbot for this? It would be much quicker than my going through every single page by hand. Thanks --Kieran 10:36, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Other Stuff

s aHelloo, just for the record, I would like to note that Robbot screwed up with the DN Angel foreign language link, which caused problems. The problem stems from the fact that the bot replaced a human-created link. Since this was a foreign language link, the screw up wasn't detected for quite some time. I wrote about the issue at Talk:DN Angel.--69.212.106.58 05:10, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think the Robbot is a bit aggressive in removing interwiki links to non-existing pages on other wikis. I understand the rationale behind this, "no bad links", but sometimes the presence of an interwiki link may inspire someone to write up an article in the other language. Also, if they don't know the correct term in their native language, and the interwiki link is there, it actually helps.

Has this been discussed somewhere else? Nixdorf 11:20, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

It has been discussed, and both points of view have been put forward. I think the best place to discuss it would be The intlwiki discussion list (http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/intlwiki-l). Andre Engels 12:32, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Ok, I have temporarily switched off removing interwiki links. However, this also means that the pages on which otherwise interwiki links would be removed will now not be changed at all - if there is another language to be changed or added, this is also not done. Andre Engels 12:39, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hi Rob, could you have a quick look at User talk:Rob Hooft? Cheers, snoyes 18:47, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I don't think Rob will see this page, but I'll give him a sign when I 'see' him (seeing as in 'on IRC'). Andre Engels 20:14, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Some stuff I wrote recently visited and fixed with Robbot. Great idea!

Opus33 00:47, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Would you have a look at User talk:Alexandros and Wikipedia:Interlanguage links before changing further articles? --User:Docu

Why aren't Robbot edits hidden in RecentChanges? They should be. They are completely clustering up RC. --Menchi (Talk)â 09:52, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Now has been done, thanks Brion. Andre Engels 23:41, 13 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I don't follow the explanation of how the disambiguation process works, esp. parts 1 and 2, (so the rest isn't clear, either). On part 1, what does it mean, "this is a disambiguation page?", and on part 2, what is "this page"? The way it's explained now, I really need an example to follow. Revolver 02:35, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

What a disambiguation page is, is explained in Wikipedia:Disambiguation. In short, it is a page for a term with more than one meaning, which does not more than refer people to pages for the separate meanings. Here is an example, using the disambiguation page Georgia: Andre Engels 03:21, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Step 1: The operator selects the disambiguation page, in this case Georgia. The bot loads the Georgia page, and gives a list of its links. In this case it will look like:

Asia
Caucasus
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia (country)
Georgia (font)
Georgia, Vermont
Georgian (disambiguation)
Georgian SSR
Georgiana
Matthew Carter
Microsoft
United States
font
given name

Step 2: The bot loads Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Georgia
Step 3: The bot goes along the pages found here. In this case the list will (at the moment) for example include Braxton Bragg. The operator now sees:

== en:Braxton Bragg ==
William Tecumseh Sherman]] in [[Georgia]]. In [[February]], [[1865]], h

Step 4: Either directly or after asking the bot to give him some more text, the operator concludes that Georgia in this case means the U.S. state, and he chooses 3.
Step 5: The bot saves the Braxton Bragg page, with [[Georgia]] replaced by [[Georgia (U.S. State)|Georgia]]

Thanks! I was confused about what page we were starting at. In other words, I was thinking that the page where the change in the link was made (at the end) was the page you were starting at. I get the idea now, thanks. Revolver 03:26, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Why did you remove most of the fr: links of the French communes pages?? This pages actually exist in the French Wiki. olivier 10:20, Feb 25, 2004 (UTC)

Answered on User talk:Olivier. Andre Engels 12:32, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hungarian language

Your robot managed to replace all instances of < and > with < and >. Since the author had used these symbols to surround letter combinations which happened to include a solitary "s" this resulted in the latter part of the article appearing in strike-out mode. I assume that this was not a desired effect? Actually on revisiting the DIFF for the change I note it's also smashed a whole lot of other HTML entities as well. --Phil 16:06, Feb 26, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the bug report; I will halt the current edits until it is solved. Andre Engels 19:16, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Absolutism

Robbot replaced absolutism with moral absolutism. I'm not so sure this is a good thing. It happened on talk:pantheism Sam Spade 20:51, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I checked, and I agree that it wasn't very well. Keeping it absolutism is not good either, nor is anything else. Unlinking seems to be the best... Andre Engels 23:25, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Stop Robbot!

What Robbot is doing is annoying and not in the least helpful considering the pages on my watchlist. Just now one word in the Wolfgang Schüssel biography has been changed, but why oh why?

He [Schüssel] has been Federal Chancellor of Austria ("Bundeskanzler") since 2000.

It used to be ("[[Bundeskanzler]]"), but now it is ("[[Chancellor of Austria|Bundeskanzler]]").

When I wrote the text I deliberately wanted to draw the reader's attention to the German term, which is explained well enough on the "disambiguation" page (" ... is the German word for ..."). What's the point of redirecting it to Chancellor of Austria?

Some hours ago, on my personal subpage, [[born]] was replaced with [[birth|born]] in a passage where I documented the wrong use of links.

What else will follow? <KF> 22:48, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Exclusion list

Would you add to the exclusion list, in addition to Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages and Wikipedia:Multiple-place_names_(A) etc.:

They are not really ment to be disambiguated. For the later, see Wikipedia:Disambiguation and abbreviations --User:Docu

Hi, please also add these pages to the exclusion list:

and also

List_of_acronyms_and_initialisms

The latter uses links to the former to provide the user with a ready made list of many of the possible meanings of the TLA. One or two meanings are also included in the list. Wikibob 18:14, 2004 Mar 6 (UTC)

Part of these have already been done; I'll add the rest. Although I'm still of the opinion that these are useless pages. Andre Engels 20:35, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Once we know that they are included, we might as well drop all "undisambig. abbr.". BTW another one for the exclusion list:

List of generic names of political parties.

-- User:Docu

Actually, that was my argument to remove the link when I got to them with Robbot - as a kind of sign that that one needed not be checked any more. And that list is getting rather large already. :-) Andre Engels 10:27, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I hope this is the right page for this. Please be careful in distinguishing between function (mathematics) and function (programming), as a mathematical function doesn't have that much place in computing articles... Dysprosia 21:33, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Robbot disambiguated Dione to Dione (moon) where it should have been Dione (mythology), at Oracle and Peleiades. I've fixed both. DopefishJustin (・∀・) 22:51, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

Could you see the discussion about sorting interlanguage links alphabetically, by language name versus 2-letter language code. The Finnish Wikipedia sorts them by language name, and then Robbot puts them in disorder. Robbot needs developing. -- Anon. 17:57, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

I noticed that your robot changed some Traditional Chinese into Simplified Chinese. See the link to the Chinese wikipedia and Taiwanese wikipedia on Andy Lau. I doubt what your robot did was appropriate. Why would you put Simplified Chinese on a Taiwanese page? Kowloonese 19:24, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

If a page has an interwiki-link to a redirect, the bot changes the interwiki-link to go to the page that is redirected to. In this case, the traditional Chinese page was a redirect to the simplified Chinese page, and thus the robot 'thought' that it had to find the traditional page on the simplified page. I hope I'm being clear here. - Andre Engels 23:25, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I've been thinking about this a bit, and have decided to modify the bot so that when it finds zh-cn and zh-tw links to the same page, it will change the two into a single zh: link instead. - Andre Engels 07:02, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I am okay with folding two links into one. It is better than using Simplified Chinese on a Taiwanese page. Thank for the fix. Kowloonese 07:24, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Cats go below interwiki?

I notice Robbot has been putting the categories above the interwiki links. Cats should go below, as otherwise (owing to oddities in MediaWiki) you get huge amounts of blank space at the end of the article - David Gerard 16:15, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I have adapted the bot. I hope I haven't introduced any new bugs that way... - Andre Engels 22:06, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

We'll see how it goes next run!! %-D Is it run fully automatic, or semi-automatic (where you tell it 'yes' or 'no' each edit)? - David Gerard 10:07, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

No need to wait for the next run... I am already running it, and it seems to be working well. It's running on automatic at the moment. I couldn't keep up so long typing yes or no every 20 seconds without slacking down... - Andre Engels 12:04, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Is that what does it? I hadn't realised. Has this been reported to Mediazilla (probably a silly question but those are my speciality :-) So should I be moving cats below interwikis when I come across them during a tidying session? --Phil | Talk 14:27, Oct 5, 2004 (UTC)

I should probably learn how to search and file bugs on MediaWiki ;-) I'd be amazed if no-one's noticed it yet. I make a habit of moving them when tidying - David Gerard 15:42, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well I just tried this over at Hilary Duff (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Hilary_Duff&action=history) and the article still shows a huge dead space at the bottom. What gives? --Phil | Talk 08:15, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

Isn't one of the reasons why we placed the categories at the bottom, that white space there doesn't matter that much? BTW is this just a personal preference or is there some guideline for this? -- User:Docu

User:Noisy just brought it to my attention that Robbot is putting categories below interwiki, probably because of David Gerard's suggestion above. This is not correct: (1) most articles since the inception of the MediaWiki place categories above interwiki links (2) the style guides at both Wikipedia:Interlanguage links and Wikipedia:Categorization have explicitly advocated placing categories above interwiki links for over a month. Now, granted, I added those notes to the guides myself, but nobody complained, but only in response to the de facto state of most of the articles on Wikipedia; furthermore, no one objected to it for the entire period. Most importantly, David Gerard's comment that placing categories above interwiki links results in whitespace is not correct. The additional whitespace results when there is a blank newline between the final text of the main body and the interwiki links or categories, regardless of whether interwiki links or categories go first. Please update Robbot to putting categories above interwiki. Besides being the de facto standard on Wikipedia even before this style was added to the relevant style guides, this is intuitive, because Categories are at the bottom of the page, immediately following the text, whereas interwiki links appear off to the left side, in a column removed from the text of the article. —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 21:00, Oct 25, 2004 (UTC)

To elaborate further, I added a note about positioning of interlanguage links and categories to both Wikipedia:Interlanguage links and Wikipedia:Categorization. I did so because as I was editing articles, I was wondering which format (cats before interwiki or interwiki before cats) was preferred. After searching the relevant articles, I could find no explicit recommendation. I therefore then hit "Random page" a lot in order to determine the de facto standard, and found that overwhelmingly, Wikipedia articles placed categories before interwiki links. Therefore, in order to save time and effort searching for the answer to the same question on the part of others, I added the recommendation that categories go before interwiki links on the two relevant style guide pages.

At that time, I went with cats before interwiki only because it was the de facto standard. In the time since, I have concluded that it also makes intuitive sense. —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 21:09, Oct 25, 2004 (UTC)

Why Robbot, why?

[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Mysticism_in_Nazi_Germany&diff=0&oldid=6609487)? Sam [Spade (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Sam_Spade&action=edit&section=new)] 22:31, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Robbot does not handle sub-pages in interwiki-links correctly. But I personally agree with it there, because Wikipedia does not handle them correctly either. - Andre Engels 09:19, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

If robbot is doing things wrong, he should be stopped, and reprogrammed. Also, why would you agree with it there? I think the inter-wiki there is very helpful. Sam [Spade (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Sam_Spade&action=edit&section=new)] 16:40, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The page is on a different subject. When you scroll down two pages, there is a paragraph about the same subject, but you don't get on the right place, and even if you did, I still don't agree that it's a good idea to make such a link. - Andre Engels 13:14, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The situation is different than I thought. Both Wikipedia's and Robbot's error are not caused by the # in the link, but by the fact that the text after the link was wrong. I have now corrected it, and Robbot now accepts the link without problems and does not try to remove or change it (although I personally still am of the opinion that it's a bad idea). - Andre Engels 17:05, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

You mean you don't like this particular link? I agree its not perfect, but its the best we can do I think, and it was very helpful and informative to me when I followed it and read the article, which does have similar content (albeit only in a specific section). As far as robbot, I'll take your word on it, I don't understand inter-wiki links very well, and bots not at all ;) Sam [Spade (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Sam_Spade&action=edit&section=new)] 10:49, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I can give a bit more explanation as to why it was removed: If the bot finds an interwiki-link to a subpage, it will only consider the link as valid if the subpage header actually exists. In this case the page name was correct, but the subpage link contained a typo, and thus Robbot did not find anything. - Andre Engels 08:32, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Czech characters

See Roman Sebrle diff (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Roman_Sebrle&curid=934599&diff=0&oldid=0). Robbot removed good interwiki links (de:Roman Šebrle, et:Roman Šebrle). --Michal Jurosz 06:52, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The problem here is that 'Š' is not a character in Latin-1. Because of this, the bot is not able to correctly convert latin-1 to UTF-8 to find it on a UTF-8 Wikipedia. Because of this I am going after Robbot's edits, and check all places where it has removed a link. Sometimes it's cases like this (I got some more cases with the Estonian Wikipedia), sometimes a spelling error or typo that I can easily correct. - Andre Engels 08:34, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Change links to comments?

Robbot removes links, but it might be better to change them to comments so that later, when articles get written, they can be reinstated. Also, by putting in a comment like "Robbot found that this link was dead on October 20 2004" it would save the person who edits a page the labor of searching for the article (e.g. on a foreign-language Wikiepedia) which can be tedious and time-consuming. They can simply copy and paste the link into the search box of the foreign-language WP and seach to see if the page has since been created. Fg2 22:48, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Japanese characters in Haydn's 104th symphony--why remove link?

Hello Robbot, why did you remove the link to the Japanese version of Symphony No. 104 (Haydn)? I can't read Japanese, but superficially it looks legit. Opus33 18:35, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The link goes to a non-existing page. - Andre Engels 09:20, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

AE, quite to the contrary! I've checked twice. Please exercise care in your robot activities so you don't revert legitimate changes. Yours very sincerely, Opus33 15:44, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've checked twice too, and it is still a non-existing page. Just compare the contents of the page with ja:Complete and utter nonsense such as asdfjgnpasdfijgo9r hgphboadgasidgo9aweuhgftvioasp. - Andre Engels 09:18, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hello AE. I've investigated further. Of the two computers I use, one displays the Japanese article as the "utter nonsense" you describe. The other displays Japanese characters. The clear inference, I think, is that the article is legitimate, and that all of your computers, and one of my computers, lack the software needed to display Japanese characters.

I'll wait a bit for a reply and if no further light can be shed on the question, I'll revert again--it seems the only fair way to deal with whatever person put up the Japanese article.

With all respect, may I recommend more caution in robot-assisted editing? Since you're getting just a quick peek at articles that other people have been working on for much longer, it would seem that the right policy is: when in doubt, don't change. Yours very truly, Opus33 20:59, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The robot just strips interwikis to the Japanese Wiki. I don't think it's working at all well. It'll take ages to repair all the crap. Noisy | Talk 21:14, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I now think AE is probably right on this particular one. I got a Japanese Wikipedia editor to help me, and (s)he says the page is really empty. Perhaps something funny is going on with my cache.

There are Japanese characters there, yes. But those are the Japanese Wikipedia variant of 'there is no page on this subject - Andre Engels 18:28, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

On other hand, AE seems to be getting enough criticism about robot edits elsewhere that I think I would like my general request to him ("when in doubt, don't change") to remain unaltered. Opus33 22:19, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Broken bot?

Removed links on Star Trek Why? I'm not sure. It also moved around a lot of stuff that was unecessary (lnaguages in aphabetical order. It did a lot, I don't know why this was classified as a "Minor Edit" Mostly Reverting changesMcKay 22:51, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hmmm... Klingon interwiki links don't work, so the bot removes them... But now I see they do work, but look like normal links?!? I'll see what to do about it.... - Andre Engels 09:11, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yep - it seems to be broken. It is contravening policy by putting the category and interwiki links in the wrong order. There must be hundreds of articles that need repairing. Please stop it and correct it so that categories come before interwiki links. Thanks. Noisy | Talk 17:48, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC) (Add policy reference. Noisy | Talk 22:33, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC))

I was wrong. It's broken thousands upon thousands of articles! Didn't you think to check what it was doing before launching it? What a disaster. Noisy | Talk 19:05, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

If you read higher up on this page, you see that I put it that way ON EXPLICIT REQUEST!!!!!!! - Andre Engels 07:10, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Interwiki link deletion

This edit (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=XviD&curid=201544&diff=0&oldid=0) claims to be "Modifying:fr", but its only effect is to delete the link to the fi page.

Explanation? Smyth 13:07, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The French one is changed - from 'XVID' to 'XviD'. The Finnish one is not deleted, it is only moved downwards. - Andre Engels 18:13, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Whoops, sorry. Smyth 17:02, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Please do NOT substitute redirections!

Dear Robbot, dear Andre,

if a link points to a redirection, this may be a "temporary fix" waiting for the truly adequate page to be written.

If you substitute such links by the redirection pointer,

this will prevent people from writing the adaequte (maybe "disambig") page
this created a loss of information almost impossible to recreate

E.g. you changed the link "de:Exponentiell" on exponential to "de:Exponentieller Vorgang". The latter means 'exponential process', and this is of course not at all the same than 'exponential' in geneal.

I assume that in 90 % of all cases, the changes you made (regarding this issue) are NOT an improvement, so please, STOP THIS, or at least, Robbot, ask Andre for explicit individual confirmation before doing THIS.

THIS IS IMPORTANT ! - Thanks, in the name of all wiki users. MFH 14:35, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

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