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

[christycorr]

*wiki committee member*

I've used Autolinking in a wiki of my own, and oh God, it was painful. I disabled that extension within a couple of weeks and never looked back.

There are bots out there programmed to do some of the tedious tasks, but it would probably be useful to have people knowledgeable in Python before we attempted to do something? Wikipedia bots usually have at least one user each in charge of checking everything the bot does to ensure it's not malfunctioning.

[lian]

which version did you use, do you recall? Because the current one *seems* to have done away with most of the head-desky features. (am asking out of self-interest as well, boss-person wants auto-linlking bad, and I need to gauge if it's more work to talk them out of it or just install the damn thing. *sighs*)

if it's not feasible, should we collect a wishlist of tasks to automate and put up a call for python-able users?

[christycorr]

I really don't—it's been a while. And your point about excessive redirects is valid; they're a pet peeve of mine, too.

(Incidentally, I'd kill to be paid to wiki. *envies*)

We'd need python- and wiki-savvy people—do you reckon there are many among our users? *sighs* I've used this bot for a lot of menial tasks, but I don't know how useful it would be at fanlore.

[ratcreature]

A lot of the redirects are just to try to balance the massive FAIL of the search engine though (I live in hope for the promised improved version to be there soon). Disambiguation pages too. I can't count the number of times I created duplicates (despite searching) and only found them once I added things to the many lists manually.

Like I made an entry for Starborne (the newsletter) because I couldn't find it yet, after searching starborne, starborn and star born, but it turned out it was already there as "Star-Borne" because that was what's on the cover.

[ratcreature]

Also looking at the bot, the automatic fix for double redirects would be useful at least, considering how oven pages get moved around. I and a few others have been doing this manually, but it is very tedious if it is forty you fix and not just one or two.

[christycorr]

That's pretty easy to set up, but there would have to be someone in charge of each bot—just in case. I'll talk to Meri about this.

[ratcreature]

Yay! Laziness, the motor of progress! *G*

[arduinna]

\o/