User:RABot

This is user-supervised script designed and operated by User:Dragons flight.

The goal of this script is to automate some of the more mundane cleanup tasks associated with Wikipedia:Requested articles. Specifically, it is designed to remove articles after they are created, tidy up the page formatting, and ensure that lists of desired articles stay sorted.

This bot has lived on Wikipedia for 8 weeks now and removed ~2400 entries from RA. Observers should notify me via the talk page if you notice this bot doing anything inappropriate. Since this script only runs under my supervision, I will be reviewing and approving all of its proposed edits, so hopefully I will catch any mistakes before they can occur. (The other consequence of this is that it will only be running infrequently, i.e. when I am around and interested in monitoring it.)

What does it do?

This script automagically parses the text of most articles in Category:Wikipedia requested articles and does the following:

1. Looks for and removes blue links that are not part of headings, instructional text (e.g. "See also..."), labels, etc.
2. Places each requested article on its own line with a "-" seperator
3. Sorts each list of articles into alphabetical order (this is skipped for lists including inline headers or other text that the script can't parse).
4. Adds inline alphabetical labels, of the form A:, B:, etc. to lists with more than 30 entries.
5. Removes alphabetical labels from lists with fewer than 30 entries or when all entries for the corresponding letter have been removed.
6. Updates opening line of file to reflect first level section headings on pages with complicated nests of subheadings and subsubheadings, etc.
7. Respects common compound requests, e.g. "foo and bar", "foo / bar", so that both are treated as a unit and neither is removed till both articles are created.
8. Deals with lists denoted by bullets or number, e.g. Wikipedia:List of missing Africa topics

What doesn't it do?

1. Change the order of headings / subheads.
2. Change capitilization or check for articles with other capitilization (e.g. foo bar vs. Foo Bar)
3. Check that requests are reasonable - More than a few requests are fairly silly and should probably be weeded out, but I am not trying to do that.
4. Follow special instructions. In a couple places, users have left notes of the form "When updating this list, please ...". Such notes are generally ignored.
5. Sort lists involving bullets or numbers.

Exceptions

1. Presently no sorting is performed on the requested articles for culture and find arts or sports as these contain many lists organized by a person's last name and the script doesn't understand that ordering.
2. Special characters, such as Φ, when occuring at the start of a request, will be sorted into a seperate section labeled !:.
3. Most lines starting with text other than [[ or an alphabetical label (e.g. A:) is assummed to be a comment / label and ignored.
4. Alphabetical labels ocurring on new lines (i.e. preceeded and/or followed by two new lines) are assummed to denote manually sorted lists and sorting is disabled in that section. This could be used, for example, to create lists ordered by a person's last name.

Feature requests / bug reports

Requests for features and/or notes about bugs such be left on the talk page associated with this account.

Footnotes

Statistics on the performance of this script and the evolution of Wikipedia:Requested articles are available at the stats page.

Special thanks and wikilove to User:DMG413 and all the editors that have worked to keep requested articles clean until now.

Dragons flight 03:05, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)