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]

There's an extension that does this. Autolinking has its draw-backs, though, so they wikimmettee would need to weigh in on this.

Not a total solution to automation, but some partial solutions.

[facetofcathy]

If the bot worked well that would be awesome, but it sounds like maybe not so much? I don't actually type any brackets a lot of the time.

I search on Fanlore for the text I want to link, go down the return list and Ctrl click to open each page in a new tab. Go to the first tab and...

I open the page to edit, hit Ctrl + F type the text I want into the search box, click next, and then my browser highlights the text, and I click the Internal link button in the toolbar and the link is made.

After I close that tab, the search bar is still there with my text still in it, so it's click, click, click and on and on. It's actually more of a hassle saving the page, but my browser will autofill the comment box so that's partly automated too.

This obviously won't work as a shortcut method in every single circumstance. Sometimes you have to do some editing anyway, but in a lot of instances it is the fastest way I have found to make multiple wikilinks across multiple pages.

This might not work in every browser. I use Firefox for Ubuntu, but I recall IE highlighting in the same way.

If someone can't comfortably use a mouse this method is likely not any help at all.