Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ListasBot 3

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: Matt (talk)

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic, unsupervised

Programming Language(s): C# (under AWB)

Function Overview: Fixing incomplete redirects.

Edit period(s): Continuous

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function Details: In running ListasBot 2, I've come across a fair number of pages where the article's mainspace page was redirected somewhere else, but the talk page was left alone. This bot would traverse talk pages and look at the article's mainspace page. If the mainspace page is a redirect page, then the talk page would be replaced with a redirect to match the mainspace's redirect -- e.g., if Daniel R. Kerns had been redirected to Jacqueline Lichtenberg, but the talk page was left alone, then the talk page would be replaced with a redirect to Talk:Jacqueline Lichtenberg.

• Wouldn't that destroy any information on the talkpage? – Quadell ^(talk) 03:49, 19 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  It would. However, the question arises, how often is anyone going to be looking at the talk page of a page whose mainspace has been redirected? Many of these pages haven't had any real activity on them for quite some time. Not to mention that even if we did remove the information on the page, it would still be preserved in the history. However, if this is unacceptable, we can counter this by just prepending the redirect tag to the page's text -- that way, the redirect still works, and the text of the page is preserved. Matt (talk) 05:09, 19 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I'm going to post this on the Village Pump to try to get a consensus on the issue. If you are coming here from my request at the Village Pump, here's the question at hand -- if article A has been redirected to article B, but Talk:A has been left unchanged, is it appropriate to replace the content of Talk:A with a redirect to Talk:B? Under all circumstances or not? If not, then under what circumstances would it be appropriate? Should the contents of Talk:A be merged into Talk:B somehow? Thanks in advance all, Matt (talk) 02:17, 20 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• First off, if Talk:B doesn't exist, then Talk:A should just be moved to Talk:B. Right? The debate is about if there are two separate talk pages, right? – Quadell ^(talk) 02:24, 20 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  Right...but does that happen (where Talk:B doesn't exist)? Matt (talk) 02:26, 20 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  I'd think that would happen a fair percentage of the time. Say there's an article Shmedlap examples and a Talk:Shmedlap examples, and Shmedlap examples is moved to List of shmedlap examples, but the talkpage isn't moved. Until someone creates a Talk:List of shmedlap examples, it'll be a redlink. Talk:Shmedlap examples should be moved, not made into a redirect to a non-existent talkpage, obviously. – Quadell ^(talk) 12:36, 20 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• In cases where there is a talkpage at Talk:Old article name and a talkpage at Talk:New article name, and Old article name is a redirect to New article name, I'm very uneasy about a bot overwriting the old talkpage to a become a redirect. I also don't think a cut-and-paste merge of the talkpages is a good idea for a bot to blindly do. I suspect that 90% of the time, or more, the old talk page contains nothing of importance and can be overwritten by a redirect -- but there will be times when the old talkpage is important, including its edit history, and a bot just can't tell when those cases are. In an extreme example, the old talkpage could contain a complaint from the subject of a BLP, or a history of a content RFC, or details hashing out how a contentious section was compromised on. These should be properly merged into the new talkpage, edit-history and all. It will be rare, but as I said, a bot can't tell. – Quadell ^(talk) 12:44, 20 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, here is an example of what I propose to do. This preserves a link to the old talk page, so that the history can be easily retrieved if needed. Anything inside of template brackets is put inside of <pre> tags so that we can see that a template was used there, but doesn't actually include it a second time. Matt (talk) 18:26, 20 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't know if that's the best solution. Downsides include: the history is not with the edits, there are potential problems with sections, and most of the time it will be unnecessary information. I would prefer the solution:

  For each such talk page, see if it contains anything other than whitespace and templates. If it does, save the Wikicode and the URL of the current version of the page (example). Either way, then you can change the talk page to a redirect to the new talk page. The urls and wikicode can be saved to a page like User:ListasBot/old talk pages, for human readers to look through. If it looks valuable, we can tag to merge them. Most of the time, we'll just deleted them from the list.

  Does that sound doable? – Quadell ^(talk) 20:08, 22 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  I think it might be easier to have the bot make a list of whatever the bot finds, and let the human make the decision from there...I mean, there can't be THAT many, right? I posted an example at User:ListasBot/old talk pages at the bottom. Matt (talk) 00:16, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  One problem with your list, as you have it, is that it doesn't show the user what was in the talk page. That's minor, and if it's too much work, it isn't really necessary. But a bigger problem is that the list doesn't link to the version of the old talk page that had the deleted content. To see that, a checker would have to click the link (which would be redirected), click the "redirected from" link, click history, find the right version, and view it. It would be so much easier for our human checkers to have a direct link to the content in question. – Quadell ^(talk) 00:56, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're proposing -- are you proposing to save the content of the old talk page to User:ListasBot/old talk pages (or something similar) AND replace the content of the page with a redirect to the new talk page? Matt (talk) 08:40, 23 April 2009 (UTC) *smacks self* Ok, I see what your idea is...sheesh, I guess there's something to be said for actually READING what people say...I thought your proposal would have been to leave the original pages alone. Ok, yes, that could be done. Matt (talk) 08:42, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  Great! Anybody see any problems with this strategy? Otherwise, I'm likely to approve soon. – Quadell ^(talk) 13:37, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  Question -- suppose you had a situation where you had a talk page that, before the article was redirected, was used significantly, and was regularly archived. But, since the article was redirected, the talk page went into disuse, and now had nothing on it except for the maintenance templates -- including one that listed the archive pages on it. Under the methodology we worked out above, this page would probably be replaced with a redirect to the new page, and the bot would not think to list it at User:ListasBot/old talk pages, since it was nothing more than templates and whitespace. Is this a significant enough possibility that we should have the bot list ALL pages it changed at User:ListasBot/old talk pages, instead of just ones that had something more than templates and whitespace? Matt (talk) 15:48, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  Hm. I guess it would be best if your list omits talkpages with nothing but templates, but includes those that have one of the common archive templates. – Quadell ^(talk) 16:53, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  How many archive templates are there? If it's a reasonable number, I can check against that. Matt (talk) 17:29, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  {{Archive box}} is the most common, with synonyms of {{Archivebox}}, {{Talkarchives}}, and {{Archive-box}}. Others are {{Archive list long}} and {{Archive box collapsible}}. That's really all you would have to worry about. – Quadell ^(talk) 18:21, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  All right, well I guess I'll get to work on coding then. Man, epic fail on getting any sort of input from the Village Pump. Matt (talk) 19:09, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Coding is done. I'm slightly confident it will work as expected. Test edit results:
  • If A redirects to B, but Talk:B does not exist, move Talk:A, to Talk:B: 1 2
  • If Talk:A should be preserved, add its contents to User:ListasBot/old talk pages: 1 2
    • Replace Talk:A with a redirect to Talk:B: 1 2
  • If Talk:A does not need to be preserved, replace the page with a redirect to Talk:B and do nothing more: 1

  Matt (talk) 03:17, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"Slightly confident". I like that. Approved for trial (50 talk pages). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. But make sure you have at least one example from each of the three categories. – Quadell ^(talk) 03:45, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

• Hmmm, you think we should add {{oldafdfull}} to the "copy this to User:ListasBot/old talk pages" list (since this and this happened)? Matt (talk) 04:17, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  No, I think it's fine. – Quadell ^(talk) 04:25, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  Okey doke. As a side note, the "Talk:B does not exist" situation hasn't come up at all in the trial yet. I'm sure it's happened, but it doesn't seem to happen that much. I take that back...it DOES happen. Matt (talk) 04:37, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete.. Results:

Oops, forgot to include the two moves in my 50, so I actually touched 52 pages instead of 50. My bad. Matt (talk) 05:23, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. Very thorough report. Looks great. – Quadell ^(talk) 15:48, 25 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.