I wish tedious things were more automated in the wiki

[ratcreature]

There must be a way to have some kind of bot to do routine maintenance tasks that don't take any thought at all. Like when you make a new fan profile, and the fan is not consistently wikilinked, and the fan is prolific, manually inserting wikilinks to connect the article properly just sucks. Really sucks. I've inserted the same four brackets in dozens and dozens of pages just checking a few names. It took hours and is a task that requires no thought at all. (I'm not talking about difficult things like spotting variances or such just wikilinks that match exactly.) You run a search on the title of the article, go to the result list, check the first article for "is the first instance of this string in double brackets?" if yes, do nothing, if no add the brackets and go to the next result, and do the same over and over and over again. Couldn't there be some kind of maintenance bot checking this for all newly created articles and maybe the old ones in batches or something?

Comments

[lian]

I haven't worked with the updated extension yet, but the old one drove.me.insane (was installed on the work wiki). Thing is, there's no way to *remove* linking, so if an article is deleted, you create a broken link. I basically hand-removed thousands of dead links in the work wiki. Yeah, still at it. UGH.

(actually, there's usually no need to delete links with the search method that's installed on Fanlore, you could just create a redirect. I'd have to look up the new search that's in test atm, though, and see how it interacts with that.)

also, it used to link every single instance of the article in one entry. Plus it didn't grasp compound articles -- so instead of [[Star Treck]] it would link [[Star]] [[Treck]] which...omg, SO nonsensical.

okay, let me look the new extension up, maybe it's improved these nightmarish qualities by now.

[ratcreature]

Okay, that would be completely insane, also not very useful. Obviously it needs to be able to link "Sue Fangirl" as [[Sue Fangirl]]. Ideally it would also need to check to avoid brackets within brackets, i.e. say the [[The Sue Fangirl Forum]] is already linked as entity and now we create Sue Fangirl, we would not want to turn this into "[[The [[Sue Fangirl]] Forum]]".

Does it have to be an extension though? I mean, early on there was a trial with a bot that might have been used to create stubs for yuletide fandoms. In the end the decision was against that, because there would have been too many fandoms that don't really have a fandom, just a yuletide story, but clearly bots can work just as an account. That way it wouldn't rampantly impact performance all the time, but maybe gardeners could start the proces from their computer by logging in as a bot account once every couple of days to have the bot go through the new pages list.

[lian]

sure, you just need someone to program that for you. Extensions are just readymade program modules that someone wrote for people who can't build it themselves. I'm pretty sure that a bot provides its own challenges/implications, though.

ETA: my comment below is a lot of technobabble, so to answer the pertinent bits -- yes, the extension does useful linking now, it should recognize and correctly link [[Sue Fangirl]] as well as [[The Sue Fangirl Club]].

What I meant by "non-destructive" is that if I understand "create link through pageview", the link is not altered in the code itself, so if an article disappears, no dead link should result. Which would be cool, but obv. you'd then load up the linking ...mechanism with each pageview. Ouch.

I may be understanding that wrong, though! I'm just a wiki dabbler and don't speak actual code.