Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/Automation

The automation department of WikiProject United States uses various automated and semi-automated methods to perform batch tasks that would be extremely tedious to do manually; it collects requests for tasks, discusses whether they are suitable for automation, and attempts to match them with bot operators or users of semi-automated tools for implementation. All project members are invited to request tasks and to comment on the suitability of outstanding requests.

What is automation for?

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The current scope of WikiProject United States is enormous and covers many thousands of articles. These articles must be tagged as being maintained by the WikiProject, their infoboxes replaced or deprecated, and so forth. Given the sheer number of articles, it is quite tedious to do these things by hand; therefore, various automated or semi-automated processes have been set up to perform these maintenance tasks.

How to help?

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Depending on the nature of the task, it can be either completely automated and run by a bot, or semi-automated via AutoWikiBrowser, requiring a user's decision to whether or not implement the changes. Indeed, in order to minimise false positives, some of the operations should be performed by hand.

Rules of thumb
  • If you don't have a bot, don't take up a task that can be automated and involves a great number of articles - you will lose precious time pressing Ctrl-S in AWB.
  • Don't create your own bot if there is no need to - a few bots will probably be more than enough.
  • Don't assign yourself a task if you don't have time for it.
  • If you can only do a part of a task, once finished, update the number of articles remaining, and move it back to unassigned.
  • If the task is semi-automated only, it is because there are numerous false positives, so check every article before saving.
  • Don't forget to uncheck "ignore unexisting pages" in AWB's "Set options" tab when dealing with talk pages!
  • If you want to help, look at the list of unassigned tasks below, assign it to yourself by adding your name to the appropriate column, and start kickin' :)
  • Once completed, put this fact in a visible manner somewhere in the list.

What is a task?

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A task is a maintenance operation that can be executed on a precise set of articles. It can be identified by several parameters:

  • Its name
  • A description of the initial set of articles on which the operation must be performed and of the unitary operation itself, along with conditional parameters. The initial set can be:
    • A category
    • A list of pages transcluding a template
  • Whether or not it can be automated (see above)
  • The number of articles in the initial set

Note: "non-recurrent" tasks should actually be reperformed once every few months, to take into account new articles created on the subject. However, moving a finished non-recurrent task back to unassigned will be done at discretion of the project coordinators.

General notes

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When a task involves tagging articles from a stub tag and automatically rating them as "Stub-Class", the auto parameter in {{WikiProject United States}} must be set:

{{WikiProject United States
|class=Stub
|auto=yes
...
}}

Participants

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Bots and operators

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BotName Talk Owner Purpose Frequency Notes
TedderBot (talk) Tedder Patrols New Articles and puts relevant articles into the New Articles lists of the project Daily Current - Saves in subpages under WPUS as well as many of the projects. See the table at Wikipedia:WikiProject United States/To do for the list
AAlertBot (talk) H3llkn0wz and Headbomb Alerts the project to important activities pertaining to the articles in its scope Monthly Current - See Article alerts or the main page for Alerts relating to this project
DASHBot (talk) Tim1357 Performs a Variety of things, mostly related to Unreferenced BLP's Daily Current - Creates a Page of Unreferenced BLP's for the project here
DodoBot (talk) User:EdoDodo WikiProject banner tagging As requested Current - Adds WPUS banner to articles and replaces supported projects banners
Femto bot User talk:Femto Bot Rich Farmbrough Creates a watchlist for the project Daily Current - see the watchlist
JL-Bot (talk) JLaTondre Updates a listing of recognized content for the project and the portal Daily Current - Creates a page of Recognized content for the project here as well as each of the associated projects.
MiszaBot II (talk) Misza13 Automatically archives inactive discussions on the talk page As defined (currently every 15 days) Current
Mr.Z-bot (talk) User:Mr.Z-man Creates/updates a list of most popular pages Monthly/by request Current - See Popular pages
NoomBot (talk) USer:Noommos Relaces links As requested Current - Cannot be more than 5000 articles, a request has been open in Bot requests for at least 3 days with no opposition.
WP 1.0 bot (talk) USer:CBM Updates Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index and its subpages Daily Current - The article must be in the Wikiproject's articles by quality category to be counted
Wikinews Importer Bot (talk) User:Misza13 Automatically imports certain Wikinews pages into Portal:United States As they occur Keeps the In the News section of Portal:United States updated
Xenobot Mk V (talk) User:Xeno Automatically tags and assess projects As requested Must have consensus, must be requested.

AWB users

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  1. Kumioko (talk · contribs)

Current tasks

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Proposed tasks

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Please add a brief description of the proposed task below; once it has been determined that it can be safely carried out, and that there are no objections to doing so, it will be moved into the tables above.

All project members are invited to comment on these requests—particularly if they notice any problems with the proposal!

Resources

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