Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/RussBot 2

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: R'n'B (call me Russ)

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic

Programming Language(s): Python (Pywikipediabot framework)

Function Overview: Fix targets of redirected talk pages that meet criteria outlined below

Edit period(s): One time per database dump

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Y

Function Details: From an analysis of the last database dump, I have generated a report of pages in the Talk: namespace that are redirects but whose targets appear to be incorrect. These fall into two groups: (a) the corresponding article is not a redirect; and (b) the corresponding article is a redirect, but to a different target than the talk page target. This bot task would make the following changes:

1. For talk pages in category (a), if the corresponding article is a disambiguation page, the redirect will be removed and the {{DisambigProject}} banner will be placed on the talk page. (Based on my manual review of the results so far, this is a common case, accounting for roughly 3/4 of all the misplaced redirects in this category.) If the article is not a disambiguation page, the talk page will be skipped.
2. For talk pages in category (b), the redirect will be changed to point to the talk page of the article that the corresponding main-space redirect points to. I cannot think of any valid reason to allow Talk:TITLE to redirect to Talk:TITLE-2 when TITLE is a redirect to TITLE-1. Changing the redirect to Talk:TITLE-1 does not risk losing any content, since the title is simply a redirect both before and after the bot operation. Caveats: (1) the database dump is old, so the bot will load both the talk page and the corresponding mainspace page to make sure the redirect targets are still valid before doing anything; (2) if Talk:TITLE-1 is also a redirect (an unlikely case), the target of that redirect will be used in place of Talk:TITLE-1; (3) if Talk:TITLE-1 does not actually exist, the page will be skipped.
3. Any talk page redirect that is not automatically fixed under either of the preceding two points will be listed on a log page.

Looks good to me. If the article doesn't exist that the article is redirecting to, you'll log accordingly, won't you? Of course you will. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 18:13, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

The bot should also properly handle the case where Talk:TITLE-1 is itself a redirect to Talk:TITLE-3; consider for example Template:uw-v1 and its talk page. I don't know that this would ever actually happen in the Talk namespace (do we ever do {{central}}-style redirections in the Talk namespace?), but better safe than sorry. Anomie⚔ 19:31, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Responding to Jarry1250: yes, if the bot doesn't edit the talk page, it will list that page in its report (which will replace the current report linked to above). Responding to Anomie: OK, if TITLE-1 is an article but Talk:TITLE-1 is a redirect to Talk:TITLE-3, the bot will redirect the Talk:TITLE to Talk:TITLE-3, assuming all the other criteria are met. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 16:30, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

NOTE: I have amended the proposed task since the preceding comments were posted. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:08, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

There are some random talk pages like where the {{central}} is used, but those are rare. Looks good to me, approved for Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete.. MBisanz ^talk 06:00, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

• Trial complete. Contributions are here and the bot's log (which is short because I shut down the whole operation after 50 edits) is at User:RussBot/Talk page redirects report/trial/1. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 10:23, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Ack. Didn't we just get rid of {{WPRedir}} (a WikiProject talk page tag for redirects)? How is tagging the talk pages of every disambiguation page any different? Is anything served by adding these tags? --MZMcBride (talk) 17:19, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Um, I don't know. But I'm not tagging the talk page of "every disambiguation page"; I'm only putting the banner on talk pages that already existed but were incorrectly redirected to the talk page of a different article. (Typically, this happens when a user moves "A" to "A (subtopic)", leaving a redirect behind for both "A" and "Talk:A", then changes "A" into a disambiguation page but forgets that the talk redirect is there.) --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:46, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Ah, fair enough. The edit summaries ("Robot: creating talk page for disambiguation page") are sometimes a bit misleading, though I'm not sure if there's a better word than "creating." --MZMcBride (talk) 01:18, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

 Approved. With concerns allayed, I'm approving the bot. MBisanz ^talk 06:04, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.