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: Jogers

Automatic or Manually Assisted: automatic, supervised

Programming Language(s): AWB

Function Summary: date formatting

Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): one time run

Edit rate requested: 1 edit per minute

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

Function Details: The bot would allow date preferences to work in case when piped links to years "in music", "in sports" etc. are used inappropriately e.g. [[January 1]], [[2006 in music|2006]] -> [[January 1]], [[2006]]. I've been using these regular expressions with AWB for a while and I never had to intervene so I think it would be safe to allow me to work in automatic mode. I will post the regexes I use if anybody is interested.

Sounds safe to me, you want a flag with that? -- Tawker 05:24, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, please. Could you add Jogersbot to the AWB checklist so it can run in automatic mode? Jogers (talk) 10:42, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

One second...is there any kind of consensus that this change should be made? Also, do you have an estimate on how many edits would be required? —Mets501 (talk) 20:56, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There is a long-standing guideline on WikiProject Music saying that piped links to "years in music" shouldn't be used at all. This seems to be somehow controversial though. My question if anybody would object to fixing at least these links which break the date preference didn't receive a lot of attention but I fixed hundreds of them in many popular articles and nobody complained (actually one person came by my talk page to say thanks [1]) I was thinking only about links to "years in music" at first but it can safely be done for the others too. It's hard to say how many edits it would require. I expect few thousands. Jogers (talk) 21:55, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps more importantly, Manual of Style makes clear that full dates should be linked in a fashion that allows reader's date preferences to work. Jogers (talk) 09:57, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unbreaking date preferences seems like a good thing; unpiping stand-alone date links in general seems much more doubtful, especially as its status as a guideline looks a bit ropey. I'd have no objection to the former, the latter would probably need wider discussion. Alai 16:42, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I only intend to do the former. Jogers (talk) 17:03, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial. Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. You're on the AWB bot approved list now. —Mets501 (talk) 18:43, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Jogers (talk) 18:49, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I forgot to ask, where are you getting the list of pages to work on from? Do you have an estimate as to how many total edits your bot will be making? —Mets501 (talk) 16:25, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm currently working on the list of pages linking to "years in music" articles. 5% – 10% of them contain full dates with broken reader's preference so I expect few more hundreds of them. Next, I plan to do the same thing for "years in film", "year in sports" etc but I don't have an estimate how many edits it will require in these cases yet. Jogers (talk) 16:43, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, that's very inefficient. Have you considered getting the list from a database dump? —Mets501 (talk) 17:09, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't thought of this. Thanks for the suggestion. Jogers (talk) 17:32, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. Try it out, and if you have any problems you can ask me. Basically, you'd download the dump, and it AWB's dump searcher you'd search for the regex that you're already using to make the edits. —Mets501 (talk) 17:35, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds great. I'm downloading the dump right now. Jogers (talk) 17:40, 28 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is so much better with the database dump. I wish I knew about this before. The estimated number of edits from now on is 4500. Jogers (talk) 15:16, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. Everything seems to be in order. This bot shall run with a flag. —Mets501 (talk) 15:45, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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.