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]

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.