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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Cyde (talk | contribs) at 20:38, 31 May 2016 (→‎Bot's edit summary). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Category moves

Hi Cyde,

Could you make it so that, when moving (or speedily moving) a category from an old title to a new title, Cydebot will delete the old title as a default? This does not appear to be happening currently and can be very problematic depending on why the category was renamed. While a category redirect is often useful, they should be created as a result of human judgment, not mass-created by bot except under very narrow parameters.

Thank you, -- Black Falcon (talk) 05:22, 26 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ping, to keep the archive-bots away. -- Black Falcon (talk) 05:57, 15 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly support this request. If the bot is currently keeping redirects that have incoming links from user pages, please ignore User:RussBot/category redirect log and User:Mdann52/CfD. – Fayenatic London 20:18, 28 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Mind you, the best of all worlds would be a way for the admin who lists the category to choose whether the redirect gets kept or not. Maybe on the Working page, split the Speedy and the Move/merge sections into two? Or use a prefix e.g. ** to indicate keeping a redirect? – Fayenatic London 17:01, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Black Falcon and Fayenatic london: Changing the CFDW format would be a bit more work, and we can consider that if we feel that it would be genuinely useful. As a stopgap solution, how about if I simply update the bot to not leave behind a redirect at the old page? Is that better default behavior? That's how the bot was running for a long time (almost a full decade), if I recall correctly. --Cyde Weys 01:52, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I do believe that would be better default behavior for Cydebot. I think Fayenatic london's idea would be optimal, but I do not know the amount of work that would be involved and so hesitate to ask you to take on that burden for a task that takes only seconds to perform manually—literally just typing {{Category redirect|}} and copy-pasting the name of the destination category. Thanks! -- Black Falcon (talk) 02:14, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that not leaving the redirect would be a better default.
Black Falcon, if the category was renamed (as opposed to merged), a much easier option is to Undelete the redirect that is (temporarily) created by moving the page. – Fayenatic London 12:20, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Black Falcon: Exactly how often are redirects desired on the old category page anyway? You'd know better than I. I'll change the default redirection behavior as soon as my other pending fix for edit summary messages goes in. --Cyde Weys 02:44, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
While Cydebot has been generally not deleting them, I've been deleting some but leaving more than 50% in place. Before, I used to create/undelete a lot less than half. So for me, whether they are "desired" depends quite a lot on whether they need any action on my part. Objectively, I prefer to have a redirect where the old name is a plausible category that someone might well add to an article, esp. variant spelling/punctuation, or short/former names e.g. for sports teams.
Pinging @Good Olfactory: as well. – Fayenatic London 12:20, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Cydebot is thrown by invisible control characters

Hi, I've noticed that Cydebot sometimes doesn't move a few articles when it renames a category. Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Openmind_Projects&diff=721440632&oldid=721431310 – the page had an invisible control character at the end of the category name. Please can you program it to catch these as well? – Fayenatic London 21:44, 21 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The specific character in question was LINE FEED. How the hell did that even happen -- was someone editing with an electric typewriter? I'll try to figure out how that impacts the regexes that pywikibot uses. --Cyde Weys 03:08, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, worse than that. That alone probably would've been OK. What was really screwy was the presence of a LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK character between "Thailand" and the closing square brackets. You can sort of infer its presence without having to resort to codepoint inspection of the text by noticing that Thailand is marked in the diff as having changed. What a mess. Looks like MediaWiki is stripping this out for the purposes of determining what the category should be, but Pywikibot isn't. There may not be a good solution here; Unicode-handling is notoriously hard. --Cyde Weys 03:29, 22 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Control characters sometimes get included when an editor copies the category name from another Wikipedia window, and pastes it onto the article. I think when I've done this myself, I may have copied the category name within WP:POPUPS. Sometimes the invisible control character gets converted to a visible string, e.g. Category:Example category[edit] – in which case it's obvious and I have to delete it; at other times I unwittingly save it on the page and only find out about it later, when I see a bot editing the page and removing the character. – Fayenatic London 14:45, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Here's another example: user:Rathfelder's edit before [1] – Fayenatic London 21:40, 26 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

hoax vs. forgery

A hoax and a forgery are not the same thing, and Cydebot should not be changing the category hoax to category forgery. It should also not edit war with a real live human who fixes its mistake. Awien (talk) 12:23, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Don't blame the bot, it was only implementing the consensus at Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2016_May_5#Category:Literary_forgeries (I assume that is what you are talking about). If you disagree with the close, discuss it with the editor who closed it, in this case user:Good Olfactory. – Fayenatic London 14:52, 24 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost: 28 May 2016

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:13, 28 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Bot's edit summary

Is there a chance you could shorten the edit summary that the bot uses when moving pages? See this edit; the summary is so long that the link to the CFD page is broken, mainly because the bot repeats the page's old and new names. Since the software automatically supplies the page's old and new names, I don't see why the bot needs to mention them as well. Nyttend (talk) 11:55, 30 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Already been fixed. That edit you link to is from last year. If you see any more recent misbehavior please let me know. --Cyde Weys 20:38, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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