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 The result of the discussion was Withdrawn by operator.

Operator: Selket

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Supervised during trials then automatic

Programming Language(s): Python with PyWikipediaBot

Function Summary: Moves footnotes inside of punctuation in accordance with WP:REF.

Edit period(s) Continuous with timeouts to mitigate server load.

Edit rate requested: six (6) edits per minute

Function Details: SelketBot will move footnotes inside of punctuation in accordance with WP:REF.

WP:REF specifies:

• Footnotes should be made like this. ^[1]
• They should not be made like this ^[2].

It will make these changes automatically but will have an emergency stop button. Heuristics will exclude regions labled nowiki or tt, and the bot will avoid userpages, talkpages, and the WP namespace so as to avoid correcting examples like the one above. In the event of a mistake, it will never repeat an edit without human input.

Revised Description of Operation
17:14, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

The bot will parse the latest WP database dump for the errors described above and record the articles that have said errors and the number of errors present in each. Analysis of the most recent dump shows 4716 articles with three or more footnote formatting errors. This will serve as a triage step to prevent the bot from reading all 1.6M articles "live."

Normal Operation: Using the articles identified from the database as containing formating errors, the bot will read the current version of the article, fix errors if they still exist, save the page, and time out for 10 seconds. It will continue through the list of articles in order from most to least errors until all articles flagged in the triage step have be fixed.

Trial Period: Prior to entering normal opeation, the bot will be tested in a trial period to prevent any dramatic rewrites of articles that have a large number of errors. During trial period operation, the bot will randomly visit articles that have been flagged as having three errors and will edit them as described under normal operation. It will shut down after ten edits.

I'm thinking that it's not worth all of the edits just to move a single period... — Mets501 ( talk) 15:03, 29 January 2007 (UTC) reply

However, in some articles there may be numerous needs for fixes of this type. Perhaps the bot can concentrate on those articles that have multiple targets. HighInBC ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 15:07, 29 January 2007 (UTC) reply

Yes, I was prompted to make this proposal based an articles like [1] that are just a mess. Note that there are inconsistant spaces around the footnotes, too. The irony is that reading through these well cited articles' code is very tedious and prone to errors. -- Selket 15:21, 29 January 2007 (UTC) reply

While the movement of the punctuation is a small change, it results in an overall aesthetic improvement of the article, and I think it would be a benefit outweighing the load on the server, especially if it changes multiple instances at once. Inconsistent style can really detract from the readability of an article. HighInBC ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 15:27, 29 January 2007 (UTC) reply

Might I make a suggetion have the bot only edit if it detects 2 or more changes being needed changed Betacommand ^{( talk • contribs • Bot)} 15:34, 29 January 2007 (UTC) reply

How is it proposed to identify the candidate articles for this? Would you be pre-processing article texts offline, or searching the (whole?) wiki 'live'? Alai 16:25, 29 January 2007 (UTC) reply

Good point, you may wish to download the most recent database dump, create a job list from that, then of course check to see if it still needs action before effecting it live. The mis-formatting of references is something that is likely to stick around long enough not to be adversely affected due to the lag between DB dumps. HighInBC ^{(Need help? Ask me)} 17:25, 29 January 2007 (UTC) reply

That is a very good idea and can easily be implemented. I would update the bot request page to reflect this, but I'm not sure if that is permissable once the discussion has begun. -- Selket 17:29, 29 January 2007 (UTC) reply

You can update it, no problem. — Mets501 ( talk) 14:53, 31 January 2007 (UTC) reply

There is a javascript tool doing much the same thing, User:Gimmetrow/fixRefs.js, used by the PR, FAC and FAR reviewers to clean up articles. Gimmetrow 02:48, 4 February 2007 (UTC) reply

Ok, I'll do it by hand. Thank you, Gimmetrow. Request withdrawn. -- Selket 03:43, 4 February 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.