Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests/Archive 12

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Video Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests/Archive 12

External to Interwiki

By MaxSem from Wikihermits talk page:

1. find \[http://en\.wikibooks\.org/wiki/(\S*) (.*)\], replace with [[b:$1|$2]]
2. find \[http://en\.wikibooks\.org/wiki/(\S*)], replace with [[b:$1]].

Reedy Boy 11:10, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Implementation...?

Reedy Boy 16:57, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Another common pattern is word [http://en.--whateversite--.org/wiki/word] which should be replaced by [[whatever:word]].

I would be wary of implementing the [http://en.--whateversite--.org/wiki/word] versions on their own. I have seen quite a few cases where that is used as footnotes. That may not be the correct usage, but converting it to an interwiki link would be worse as it would result in an unintelligible sentence.

Example: Alfred Tennyson's works[1] are should not become Alfred Tennyson's workss:Author:Alfred_Tennyson are.

-- JLaTondre 00:44, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

This code is for en.wiki only! We use AWB in other wiki!--OsamaK 15:28, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

We know. It hasnt been implemented as of yet (it may not ever be), so it doesnt really matter atm. Reedy Boy 19:32, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

I needed code for my tool since people didn't know which form to enter in. It has since become convenient to just paste the URL in and watch the magic happen. I hope the AWB devs implement this for the list maker parts of the interface.

A general implementation (suitable for general fixes) for foundation links from the code above:

1. Find \[http://(\w+)\.(\w+)\.org/wiki/([^{|}\[\]<>"\n]+) +([^]]+)\] replace with [[$2:$1:$3|$4]]
2. Find \[\[(?:wikimedia:(m)eta|wikimedia:(commons)|(wikt)ionary|wiki(?:(n)ews|(b)ooks|(q)uote|(s)ource|(v)ersity))(:[a-z\-]+:[^{}\[\]]+)\]\] replace with [[$1$2$3$4$5$6$7$8$9]]

It avoid the flaws from above and works across all languages.--Dispenser 04:13, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Cool, thanks! --Reedy 12:57, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

I've been using my own regexes for this (though, not as good as the combo above) and would love to see this implemented. Rocket000 (talk) 00:17, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Would be good to implement this.. Not sure why the first one is needed in the ListMaker...? If you can elaborate/be a bit more specific Dispenser, i shall get this implemented. --Reedy 17:44, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Partially implemented. rev 3036 (code exists, but not in use. As per the discussion page, it doesnt seem to actually work as a general fix or in list maker.......) --Reedy 22:20, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

While the code I provided above is good what I had coded it for (a user page input routine) it wasn't good enough for a general fix (potential language issues). Thus I've coded the following which should be nearly problem free:

-- Dispenser 01:33, 13 October 2008 (UTC) Updated: 01:56, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I've implemented the above code in my commonfixes.py library. Over time I've noticed a few problems:

1. Due to the haphazard way naming was done the above code will try to make download.wikipedia.org and sources.wikipedia.org into invalid interwikis. This can be solved using interwiki table, which would include more links than we can cover in regexes.
2. Edit on the "Wikipedia" article raises question wheather those links can be linked. And I think I read somewhere that they aren't suppose to be directly, but it still doesn't answer the question about interwiki.
3. [ { | } ] and more are not valid characters, as well as their escaped counter parts like %7B. However, this highly unlikely since people typically don't link to invalid pages anyway.

For those of you still interested in linking I've come up with a set of regex. The whatever.wikipedia.org glitch is avoid by only allowing languages with two to three letter character codes.

Regex:      \[http://([a-z0-9\-]{3})\.(?:(wikt)ionary|wiki(n)ews|wiki(b)ooks|wiki(q)uote|wiki(s)ource|wiki(v)ersity)\.(?:com|net|org)/wiki/([^][{|}\s"]*) +([^\n\]]+)\]  Replace:    [[$2$3$4$5$6$7:$1:$8|$9]]  Regex:      \[http://(?:(m)eta|(commons)|(incubator)|(quality))\.wikimedia\.(?:com|net|org)/wiki/([^][{|}\s"]*) +([^\n\]]+)\]  Replace:    [[$1$2$3$4:$5|$6]]  Regex:      \[http://([a-z0-9\-]+)\.wikia\.(?:com|net|org)/wiki/([^][{|}\s"]+) +([^\n\]]+)\]  Replace:    [[wikia:$1:$2|$3]]  

However you should likely add (?<![*#:;]{2}) to the beginning to avoid changing lists and (?![^<>]*</ref>) to the end to avoid changing links in references.--Dispenser 01:56, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

According to WP:WAWI, AWB would have to detect the difference between a convenient link to material like wikisource page and a reference link like a wikisource policy page. Luckily that's why we created namespaces.--Dispenser 08:07, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Soo.. Are we alright to implement this or something? ;P --Reedy 13:52, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes. Haven't you already? -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:08, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

[2] --Magioladitis (talk) 19:12, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Maps Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature requests/Archive 12

Handling <li> and <ul> html tags

<li>(.*?)(</li>)? --> * $1

Then just remove all other </li>, <ul>, </ul>..

</?(li|ul)> --> ""

--Reedy Boy 13:34, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

So that should be easy. Can you implement it? -- Magioladitis (talk) 02:08, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

<ol>  <li>test</li>  </ol>  <ul>  <li>test</li>  </ol>    <li>test</li>  

If we implement it, we should really cater for all that --Reedy 19:49, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I did this manually. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:46, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Ol causes complexions: This wasn't the wanted result -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:52, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

• Have care with this suggestion. There are some cases where the ol's deliberate (say, when there is also a colstart or style attribute) rather than as holdovers from some person marking his content up in HTML. --Izno (talk) 17:56, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Implementation for il/ul ONLY:

• Step 1: Remove any ul tags. Example
• Step 2: Remove any close il tags. Example
• Step 3: Convert open il tags to bullet. Example

-- Magioladitis (talk) 15:51, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

There are a number of edge cases where line breaks, comments, templates, and attributes are involved that need to be kept in mind. Some of them may even occur in articles. E.g. (see source):

• Foo bar Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. bat
• Foo Bar

  <ul>      <li>Example of a list item</li>    </ul>  

Amalthea 11:51, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

It seems to work in the general case. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:59, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

This is CHECKWIKI error 12 related FR. -- Magioladitis (talk) 21:39, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

src: i.imgur.com

Templates that end in Breaks (CHECKWIKI error 59)

Tim1357 (talk) 00:11, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

We already fix it for files. I think it should be easy to implement. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:25, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

I had to remove the break line tag manually. Moreover, it was duplicated to the Persondata entry and I had to remove it from there too. I guess this addition will also fix WP:CHECKWIKI error 59. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:09, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Better in 7171 but there is a comma at the end. Check here. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:00, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

rev 7223 for PersonData comma issue. Rjwilmsi 10:32, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

We just need to avoid: honorific prefix, honorific-prefix as the request says. I left a note to Infobox officeholder and they 'll probably fix this too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:55, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

honorific-prefix, honorific-suffix changed and don't need break lines at the end anymore. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:09, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

{{nihongo}} is also a template that uses break line tags as I was hinted in my talk page. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:40, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

• The point with hon-pref and hon-suf is that in some circs they want the pref and/or suff on the same line as the name, in others they don't. It would be bnest for the template to have the smarts to distinguish, but that would need work and consensus. Rich Farmbrough, 16:35, 22 October 2010 (UTC).
  

We now have a custom module for error 59. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:21, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Since bots run the custom module for a while now I wonder it it could be now part of general fixes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:07, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

src: i.imgur.com

More break line tags cleanup

src: cdnmo.coveritlive.com

If all headers are of level 1 downgrade them 1 level

src: i.imgur.com

When maintenance templates immediately follow section header, change to section template

Added two more suggestions above. GoingBatty (talk) 21:51, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Made them all consistent. GoingBatty (talk) 04:31, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Should this apply to templates within {{multiple issues}}? Why only to templates immediately following a header? Why not to notes/references? Thanks Rjwilmsi 17:46, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, this should apply to templates within {{multiple issues}} that have |section=yes. Only templates following a header so that it doesn't change templates in the zeroth section that would apply to the entire article. Not to notes/references sections since these templates would apply to the whole article (especially No footnotes, Refimprove, and Unreferenced). GoingBatty (talk) 01:22, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

What about change {{Very long}} to {{Very long section}} Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 10:41, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

src: th04.deviantart.net

FixReferenceTags: remove nowiki; encode titles

src: i.imgur.com

Do not include unimportant prefixes in {{DEFAULTSORT}}

I only see "In some categories, sort keys are used to exclude prefixes that are common to all or many of the entries, or are considered unimportant (such as "List of" or "The")." It doesn't say in all. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:24, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Are there categories where "The" is important in the sort? GoingBatty (talk) 00:52, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

The Beatles? -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:55, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't see anything on Category:The Beatles sorted by "The".

• Category:The Beatles music is sorted under "M"
• Category:The Beatles and television is sorted under "T" for "Television"
• Category:The Beatles concert tours is sorted under "T" "Tours"
• The Beatles Anthology is sorted under "B"
• The Beatles' influence on popular culture is sorted under "I"

Furthermore, The Beatles article contains {{DEFAULTSORT:Beatles, The}} - so I've revised my request to match this format. GoingBatty (talk) 01:27, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Adding "The" at the end is unlikely to ever make a difference, but AWB already excludes "The" from DEFAULTSORT tagging. If you look at the edit you linked, AWB did not include "The". McLerristarr | Mclay1 06:21, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Actually, you did include "The", you just gave the wrong diff. This has never happened to me; "The" is usually excluded. McLerristarr | Mclay1 06:23, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Try The Rats (play) and The UFC Chronicles. I'm using SVN 7424. Should this be moved over to the bug list? GoingBatty (talk) 17:23, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

OK, it is adding "The". I thought it didn't. Maybe I'm wrong. McLerristarr | Mclay1 15:23, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

src: static3.wikia.nocookie.net

Title case for citations

Well, except for the non english wiki's ;) --Reedy 19:50, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

Oh yeah :) I meant to change that "en" for some variable, but I couldn't be arsed to find out which was the right one. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c, rfa)}

Maybe also external link titles? Harder to grab though, I would think. - Jarry1250 ^{[ humourous - discuss ]} 09:16, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

When do you propose to convert the case of citation titles? Just when all in uppercase? Do you have some example articles? Rjwilmsi 10:27, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, in a perfect world, a citation title of "EXAMPLE: Lorem ipsum" would be converted as well, but the false positive/pointless edit rate would be too high I fear. So yes, just when all in uppercase for maximum efficiency. I would like to see this as a general fix if possible, though I haven't tested the FP rate myself yet. I shall set about finding you an example now. - Jarry1250 ^{[ humourous - discuss ]} 10:31, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Ten random pages gave me Gaynor Cawley ("BIOGRAPHY") and Mustafa Ahmed Hamlily which includes a partial one (ref #12). - Jarry1250 ^{[ humourous - discuss ]} 10:37, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

I've had some experience programming reflinks with this, you can get most of the cases right. Here some edges cases

• Newspaper Archive: MINOR STORY OF THE DAY; MAN BITES DOG
• 65_PDF.pdf
• SPACE PROBE 56T LAUNCHES
• A.I.D.S. EPIDEMIC STILL SPREADING
• FOREIGN AIDS STILL MISSING
• ATLAS USER EQUIPMENT INTRODUCTION
• FIRST ROBOTICS GIVES HOPE
• NAVSTAR GPS
• J P PENNY

Those are some example I can think off the top of my head. It also a good idea to apply it to the author/first/last/publisher fields as well.--Dispenser 12:13, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Hey, thanks Dispenser. As written, the code doesn't touch .pdf (lowercase), capitalises "Of", and turns GPS to "Gps". The rest it gets right; hopefully, a few tweaks and it should be read to roll. - Jarry1250 ^{[ humourous - discuss ]} 18:58, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Here's a much improved function for converting to useful title case, which is more palatable than block caps (I personally prefer sentence case, but that would be more controversial / less widely deployable. It works on all the examples above (and some more I invented), with the exception of acronyms that could be words UNICEF, etc. GPS has no vowels, and is therefore easy to capitalise.

- Jarry1250 ^{[ humourous - discuss ]} 20:16, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Maybe you should use a dictionary from a spellchecker to ensure words like GNU, LIDAR, and CBDTPA stay uppercased? You might also be able to capitalize names Ted Stevens.--Dispenser 18:37, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah... it's a question of how much in the way of resources one chooses to give over to such a minor (albeit intensely annoying to me) thing as capitalisation... hopefully the major acronyms can be hardcoded, and the rest left to the individual editors to catch. As the default Is This Sort Of Capitalisation, We Needn't Worry About Names Of People. - Jarry1250 ^{[ humourous - discuss ]} 18:41, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

And no matter how much effort we throw at the problem, there will always be "yet another exception", e.g. CAT scan

The answer has to be that this will be a computer-assisted process, not an entirely automated one. ClickRick (talk) 18:47, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

This could be implemented as a general fix that users would have to explicitly turn on via the options menu (off by default) and could be disabled for bots. Question then is just what fields is this required on beyond the 'title=' field of a citation template? Rjwilmsi 15:38, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

I think this was added to AWB. Not sure though but we might be able to archive this one. --Kumioko (talk) 00:47, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

We haven't added it yet. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:41, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Please ask for a bot to this. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:30, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

@Ohconfucius: - Does one of your scripts fix the capitalization in the |title= field of citation templates? (Maybe User:Ohconfucius/script/formatgeneral ?) Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 19:07, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I guess the one of Jarry1250 is fine for an example module? -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:40, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

• I have for some time thought such downcasing would be good for the 'pedia but lack the know-how to implement such a fix. I have already built in some case conversions into my formatting script to downcase certain combinations - mainly prepositions of fewer than 5 letters, per the MOS - but not restricted to titles. Most of my fixes are highly specific cases, such as "(\w )O(f|n|r) A(n? \w)" and "(\w )A(nd|t) T(he \w)", or "([Rr]unner)[\- ][Uu](?:ps)\b". I also downcase commonly capitalised "B(oard (?:of |))D(irectors?\W)" and "N(on[\s\-])[Ee](xecutive )D(irectors?\W)". Yet I constantly make a note of exceptions, so the rate of FP is tending to zero. My sources script also aligns cases for sources to the relevant WP article, even to camelcase where necessary, such as "AllMusic".

  Sites frequently treat metadata as some sort of dustbin, and some often have FULLCAPS metadata. I suspect part of the fix could lie in WP:Reflinks not importing overcapitalised metadata 'as is'. The problem isn't going away and few people bother to fix these when they do occur; there may be the belief that we should cite sources verbatim including the errant formatting. As suggested by Dispenser above, I assume that we can easily ask for specific cases such as acronyms that are not ordinary words to be exempted ("CAT scan" and not "CAT"). -- Ohc ^¡digame!_{¿que pasa?} 02:15, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

  • I've just asked Jarry to help me incorporate this code. -- Ohc ^¡digame!_{¿que pasa?} 03:01, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

src: i.imgur.com

multiple hyphens

Only if you can avoid changing "--" in a URL, or in a <!-- comment -->. Art LaPella (talk) 14:23, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't think any of AWB's changes affect URLs. McLerristarr (Mclay1) (talk) 16:05, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

"text -- text" is often used when the intent is to add an em dash, not an en dash (i.e., the intent is to have an em dash with spaces around it). In such cases it should of course convert to an em dash with the spaces removed. I do not see how a program could tell which correction to make. DGG ( talk ) 17:36, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

I disagree. I feel that the intent of "text -- text" is to have some kind of dash longer than a hyphen which is set off by the spaces. This is a stylistic choice, and in my AWB settings, I attempt to respect the original writer's intentions by replacing unspaced instances with em dashes and spaced ones with en dashes. See WP:EMDASH. MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 18:35, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

src: i.imgur.com

Fixes for Nihongo template

Usually is not good enough. I would like to understand why editors ever put such data in the template. Rjwilmsi 17:50, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

They put data in order to add extra information before the parentheses that contains the local name closes. I am not sure how we do it in other cases. Do we have two pairs of parentheses one next to the other. Btw, "usually" in this case is equal to "always with probability 1" i.e. in all the cases I observed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:01, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

• This is a language-rendering template, and use of |extra= for birth/death dates ought to be discouraged because it's not its vocation to collect this data. Biographies will usually contain {{persondata}}, which is where this metadata should be centralised. I fail to see why it should be duplicated in this, or indeed any other, template. -- Ohc ^¡digame!_{¿que pasa?} 02:28, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

src: i3.kym-cdn.com

Convert spaced hyphens to endashes

I cannot think of any exceptions to this rule. Hyphens should never be spaced, nor should emdashes. McLerristarr / Mclay1 11:25, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

It's not that easy. Think of a math formula. Replacing "2 km² - 400 m²" with "2 km² - 400 m²" doesn't make it more correct. I'm currently using the regex "([\\w'\\)>\\]\\u00C0-\\u024F"]) +-(,?) +(?=[\\w'\\(\\[\\u00C0-\\u024F,,])" -> "$1 -$2" in my tool to avoid that. --TMg 12:53, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

src: i.imgur.com

Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)

Duplicate report filed:
Currently we fix dashes in limited circumstances. I think there are several other cases that we could cover:

• Use of an em dash rather than an en dash in dates and page ranges (there are a surprising number of these)
• Spaced em dashes, though whether that should preferably be corrected to an unspaced em dash or a spaced en dash I don't know
• Spaced hyphen, in the circumstances where we currently correct a spaced double hyphen. Since these frequently occur in lists, we should fix to a spaced en dash, though many occur in date and page ranges and would need to be ordered before corrections for spacing.

I don't think any of this would be controversial. The spaced hyphen in particular is aesthetically rather unpleasant to a lot of editors.--kwami (talk) 00:51, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

We need more specific rules about this one. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:53, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Rjwilmsi The first diff is about FixNonBreakingSpaces. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:15, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Automatic title bolding

What determines if the title is italicised? Rjwilmsi 13:50, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I only mean for titles that are already italicised before AWB works on the article. It would be impossible to program it to know which articles needed italicised titles. McLerristarr (Mclay1) (talk) 03:24, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Well those transcluding {{Italic title}} would becontenders. Rich Farmbrough, 21:14, 6 September 2010 (UTC).

No changes inside single straight quotes

Do you want this as general fix? -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:46, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I thought a general fix was an edit. This is not an edit, it's almost the opposite of an edit. I suspect it would need to be an option. Not everybody would need or want to use it. Lightmouse (talk) 13:56, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I think this was fixed. If you scroll up a little youll see it. The new SVN just hasnt come out yet. --Kumioko (talk) 14:03, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

You may be referring to single curly quotes. I should have made clear that I'm talking about single straight quotes. Thanks. I've amended the text above. Lightmouse (talk) 14:06, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I note that HideMore is, by definition, an option for cautious editing. Perhaps the misses are rare enough that it could be added to HideMore for all users until we can selectively choose options. Lightmouse (talk) 14:08, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Template:'"

Where is this in the Manual of Style? This creates an awful unclosed " from the left side! -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:05, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Non-breaking spaces. (I moved it to WP:MOS from Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Non-breaking spaces where it was not relevant.) McLerristarr / Mclay1 15:49, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

234 transclsions. Interesting. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:37, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Additional measurement Hand (unit)

Remove spaces in transclusions

Unbalanced brackets

Fix unbalanced website

Fix unbalanced brackets inside gallery

I just added these two regex to my tool. They are applied only to the contents of gallery tags.

1. Replace '^(\\s*)\\[+([^[\\]]*)\\]\\]?\s*$' (RegexOptions.Multiline) with '$1$2'
2. Replace '^(\\s*)\\[+' (RegexOptions.Multiline) with '$1'

This is my test case:

<gallery>[[File:1.jpg|1]]   [[File:2.jpg|2  [[File:3.jpg|[[Valid]]</gallery>  

Expected result:

<gallery>File:1.jpg|1   File:2.jpg|2  File:3.jpg|[[Valid]]</gallery>  

--TMg 12:43, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Fix unbalanced brackets inside cite

Fix unbalanced curly brackets in redirects

Continue unbalanced check

Skipping

Multiple skip options

It would be great if it was possible in the skip section to be able to select more words so that if any of those are present then the page is skipped. --Preceding unsigned comment added by Mephiston999 (talk o contribs)

Regex? (Word1|Word2|Word3) --Reedy 19:20, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

A better phrasing would be... "it would be great if AWB could do more to help people who are entirely n00bish about regex" =) Separating it such that you could have a list of the skip log of which word it matched would be nice as well. -xeno^talk 19:21, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Required. Trying to skip if contains 'Category:Living people' or 'Birth date and age|1900|1|1'. I know no way of doing that with regex because | is the separator and thus (Category:Living people|Birth date and age|1900|1|1) don't work. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 02:50, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

When you want a literal pipe you escape it: (Category:Living people|Birth date and age\|1900\|1\|1). Rjwilmsi 07:04, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you Rjwilmsi, you learn something everyday :) Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 08:31, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I found another way around this if anyone is interested. If you use the pre-parse option, you can specify a skip option, then you pre-parse the list again with another skip option. Basically you can recurse your list as many times as you want and doing this is the same result as having multiple skip options, although it is somewhat slower because you reload the article multiple times. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 23:29, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I noticed Regex (Word1|Word2|Word3) is logical OR. How does one use it to find out: word1 AND word2 AND word3? Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 19:33, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Exactly the point. You have to do ( Word1.*word2.*word3| Word1.*word3.*word2| Word2.*word1.*word3| Word2.*word3.*word1| Word3.*word1.*word2| Word3.*word2.*word1) (Or (1(23|32)|2(13|31)|3(12|21)) )

This is bad enough but if you have 4 its even more complex . (In fact you can skip all with word 1, delete the list and copy back the skip list, skip all with word 2.. etc... and even mix these methods reasonably getting 6 "ands" in 2 passes.) So it is do-able but it would be nice to have -- Preceding unsigned comment added by Rich Farmbrough (talk o contribs) 15:50, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Template {{AWB orderless}} coming up. Rich Farmbrough, 04:32, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

John(George(PaulRingo|RingoPaul)|Paul(GeorgeRingo|RingoGeorge)|Ringo(GeorgePaul|PaulGeorge))|George(John(PaulRingo|RingoPaul)|Paul(JohnRingo|RingoJohn)|Ringo(JohnPaul|PaulJohn))|Paul(John(GeorgeRingo|RingoGeorge)|George(JohnRingo|RingoJohn)|Ringo(JohnGeorge|GeorgeJohn))|Ringo(John(GeorgePaul|PaulGeorge)|George(JohnPaul|PaulJohn)|Paul(JohnGeorge|GeorgeJohn)) - testing... takes up to 6 paramters. You really don't want to go to 7. Rich Farmbrough, 05:49, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Redlinks, redirects, dabs, ...

Skip pages of indef blocked users

Skip if disambiguation page

Skip blanked pages

Skip if only change is unicodification

Find and replace improvements

Allow advanced find and replace entries to be marked minor

Haha. Magioladitis and I were discussing this when i implemented the normal FaR one. --Reedy 22:22, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

And you decided not to allow it -- just to play a cruel joke on me??? -xeno^talk 22:24, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

We need a box to mark as minor in every rule (..and subrule??? :S). This is scary. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:27, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Haha. More a case of decided it was useful, but not so important. --Reedy 22:35, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

I suppose the minor changes I have can be moved into the simple F/R matrix. . . -xeno^talk 22:37, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

lol. It aint gonna be done pre v5 :) --Reedy 22:39, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

You're a dreamkiller, sir. -xeno^talk 22:40, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser#Feature_Freeze_for_AWB_v5 ;D --Reedy 22:41, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Bump! ;> -xeno^talk 16:10, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

[8] :P --Reedy 16:14, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Sir, you really need to get your priorities in order. Just sayin'. -xeno^talk 16:16, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

If you want to do my report for me... --Reedy 16:17, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Whoever eventually responds to this, please put a {{whisperback}} on my userpage, as this is a very active page and I'll miss the response otherwise. -- ··gracefool? 16:48, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

I just wanted to bump this discussion. We'ere at version 5 now so could we please reconsider this? Kumioko (talk) 13:46, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Apply the four generic settings individually

is that so hard to implement? i mean't split "ignore templates, refs, link targets, and heading" into separate options, and improve "ignore images" to ignore "images target" not the whole image section --84.234.42.68 (talk) 17:34, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Sounds very useful to me. Gaius Cornelius (talk) 12:32, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

As a first step we have to call HideText and HideMoreText individually. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:13, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

For now, how about just the ability to selectively add replacements to the edit summary? That seems like it would be the easiest to implement, and would be very useful to me. I often have intermediate, temporary replacements which should definitely not be in the edit summary, but other replacements which should. MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 21:47, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

A workaround I use is to set up Find & Replace rules for replacements I want in the edit summary, and Advanced Find & Replace rules for replacements I don't want in the edit summary. GoingBatty (talk) 00:40, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Please move the ignore options that are in the find and replace options (templates, wikilinks, external links, HTML comments, files, excreta) so that these rules can be applied on a per item basis, often I have find/replace that I want to do on external links, while others that I don't want on external or internal link. Having the ability to set these on a per item basis would make it easier. ?T _{^{The only constant}} 13:44, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

I've run into a need for this myself today. I have a rule that I don't want run on links/refs, but I don't want these ignore options applied to everything else. This is very frustrating as I want all my general cleanup F&R's in one settings file. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk o Work} 15:08, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

HTML substitution

Addition for "Replace Special"

Subset regex

Maybe I can example it better with an example:

I'll use HTML

We want to change String1 to RE1

What I'd like to be able to

Rule: Find the body  RE find: (<body>.*?</body>)    Sub-rule: Use what was captured in parent    RE find: String1    RE replace: RE1  

While the example is a little simplistic, it allow greater flexibly. The String1 in the title tags will never be parsed and there can be many String1 in the body without turning the recursion as with (<body>.*?)String1(.*?</body>). Hopefully that simplifies things. --Dispenser (talk) 04:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Remember "Find & Replace" (and other) window details

I endorse this request. It's a pain to have to manually resize the Find and Replace columns every time I open AWB. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:31, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Wholeheartedly agree. Yesterday I went to resize a column after opening AWB again and accidentally clicked on the heading instead of dragging the separator, thus inadvertently sorting the rules (that's an existing feature request) and forcing me to scrap the F&R rules. Chris the speller ^yack 13:55, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

I'd need the window/column sizes to be saved in the AWB folder or registry somewhere, not in the main settings file. I keep my settings files on a data stick and use the same files on a big-screen desktop and a small-screen laptop. As an aside, why is the "After fixes" column so wide? I never use it. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:18, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Find/Replace: Regex checkbox prompt

Any false positives would be extremely annoying. This would have to be explicitly turned on somewhere, which would probably make it of little value for new users. Rjwilmsi 15:29, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Or could you write a really good regex for matching regexes? - Jarry1250 ^{[ humourous - discuss ]} 09:17, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

"a*" could be a regex or a literal search. Any warnings would have to be explicitly turned on somewhere, which would probably make it of little value for new users. Rjwilmsi 09:43, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

I would personally take Jarry's suggestion with a pinch of salt for exactly that reason. To your earlier concern, though, I would say that the prompt should be turned on by default but include a "Do not show this prompt again" checkbox, which should be remembered for that user, so an advanced user will only be prompted the once. An option somewhere else (Options|Preferences..., perhaps?) to turn it back on might be appreciated, too. ClickRick (talk) 10:20, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Maybe make the default for the regex box, checked? Most non-regex (for a loose value of the word most) also wokr aas regexen, e.g. "Horse" Rich Farmbrough, 21:55, 21 April 2010 (UTC).

Copy regex find and replace from the "test regex page" to the active page

You can do that in reverse. If you go via the FaR, and right click and move to regex tester (not sure on the specifics), you can move it to the tester, edit it, and move it back... --Reedy 21:18, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

I will look for that - I have not been looking at what was available in the right click menu. When I have needed to test a complicated regex I have started writing it on the tester, and there is no indication of how to transfer it easily to find and replace. Snowman (talk) 21:35, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Anyway, I think this area could be improved to make it more user friendly. Snowman (talk) 22:44, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Typos tab of edit box: include the typo rule name as first column, alongside existing find & replace columns

copying/adding lines to find list

string find against edit box

New type of "Advanced find and replace"

Sort danger

Hmains now we provide a Cancel button. Is this satisfying? -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:19, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

• I noticed that new button and it is comforting to have. Thanks. Still, it would not help when I have just added/changed many entries in the table and am checking that they are ok and then mistakenly sort everything and destroy my work. Now I can avoid saving and thus destroying my previous-to-this-session work, but I cannot unsort what I just did. If unsort cannot be done (or more generally undo whatever I just did), even a pop-up confirmation message asking 'do you really want to sort this table?' allowing escape before doing the sort would be helpful. Hmains (talk) 01:12, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Threading, Background and Automation

Load pages in background

Migrate to API? will allow us to complete this much more easily (as below). This is very much a duplicate request.. Cant find the others, but it has been requested before. Very similar to/a simpler version of: #Background_scan_to_prune_unchanged_articles_ahead_of_time The only problem we get is if pages are updated between pre-load and save... Which, could be, of course, checked for... --Reedy Boy 20:53, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Save pages in background

Migrate to API? will allow us to complete this much more easily. With the current way, we'd have to be faffing about with multiple browsers (which we already do do...) --Reedy Boy 20:51, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

What shall we do if the save is aborted for some reason and user input is needed? All UI will already be diplaying the next page... MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 20:57, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

How about a visualization like the pre-parse mode? Pages that are saved without problems are just removed from the list and pages with errors, conflicts and so on are just marked with orange or red background and kept in the list. This way errors are handled gracefully and the fast workflow without delays is still preserved. Penguin (talk) 16:41, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

*bump* :) -- 16:26, 20 June 2009 (UTC) --Preceding unsigned comment added by Penguin (talk o contribs)

It will happen, just i've been busy for the last few months. Its on my summer todo list, most of the stuff IS implemented, its just making AWB fully use the API for editing.. --Reedy 16:28, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

What I suggest is to bunch up this request and the top request into a server request queue sort of thing. As in, let the user queue up some pages for processing and generating diffs. The user then can do something else, while it queues. Then, the user comes back, and queues up the saves after checking each page. The queue will empty itself as the user is checking the page. That way, your diffs preload, and your saves get executed a bit later, but then you get a continuous stream of pages, instead of a broken one. ManishEarth^{Talk o Stalk} 18:37, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

I could still use this feature. When doing typo work with hundreds of articles (which I do at dawiki on a regular basis) the small delays between every save really slows down the process. There are three methods that I want (maybe in combination): 1. Preload the next page (so I don't have to wait for it to load). 2. Background save of article (so I don't have to wait for it to save), 3. Create some kind of bulk save in the end. The revision conflict risk is already there even if we don't pre-load/pre-save. It should just be marked in a sensible way (for bulk saves an option to add conflicts to the could be fine - for background saves a conflict save or otherwise server error could just keep the article in the list with a "notice/warning" background color, just as with pre-parsed links) --Penguin (talk) 20:23, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

I was about to add this suggestion and found it here already. Sometimes the saves are just brutal, taking 5-10 seconds each. If they could be queued, that would be a huge time-saver. I think though that there should be a (1 sec?) time delay built into the save (move to save queue) to help prevent machine-gun/asleep-at-the-wheel saves. And the user should be able to stop saves in the queue before they are executed. Perhaps also have an option to "Stop and move back into the list" where the user wants to re-do their work. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk o Work} 14:18, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Automatic List Making?

Automatically have AWB do multiple things for bots

Well, in theory there isnt... If we could build some form of an instruction set that awb can follow... and all the functions are software call-able, its viable... Reedy Boy 08:54, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Sounds like you're talking about a sort of basic scripting language. If it is an itch someone wants to scratch make sure there are commands/points where you can prompt for user input. --Brianmc 12:12, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Agree, this is very convenient to run two scripts subsequently each with its own settings file and its own input data file. A command line parameter will be fine for script name definition. Mashiah 23:29, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Things like this can in theory already be done with plugins or modules. However, I think that AWB does need this as a standard feature. I'd like it to be able to automatically check certain categories periodically and run a bot job (with seperate settings for each category) too. I was thinking more of keeping it all in the UI and using XML to define tasks myself. Anyway, if at some point I'm looking for something to do I might investigate this further. --kingboyk (talk) 23:22, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Now we also have the "call external script" functionality, just adding enough to allow AWB to start log on (log on used to work with profiles?) and run would do the trick. Rich Farmbrough, 11:03, 11 August 2010 (UTC).

Possible plugins

Allow easy way to add missing parameters to a template, and also a way to reorder parameters

• I want to encourage this development as well. It's been seven years, and it is a sorely needed functionality not found in AWB. VanIsaac_WS^cont 05:06, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Just to check: Are you aware that everything requested above is possible to do with regular expressions in the find and replace dialog? Admittedly, doing so is much less convenient than what is requested above. It would also be somewhat less robust than would be possible if specifically programmed. -- Makyen (talk) 07:02, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Display more info for images and coordinating image tags added to menu

bumping so someone might at least respond to this.... -???????????? ^Babel_Alexandria 18:40, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

There are currently 55 other AWB feature requests, 3 dev's inactive, and a v4 to sort. This would be a major new feature, requiring quite a lot of work, as the actual html of the page would probably be needed to be loaded to get the file links, as with images being here and on commons, it doesnt make life easy. Requests that questions are needed to be asked, or input gained, have had replies...Reedy Boy 20:22, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

sorry if i sounded antsy... i wasn't aware that four of you were currently inactive during the newest upgrade. I actually had posted this a while ago when there were relatively few features being asked for so I was hoping for some sort of a response. Letting me know that loading the file links by html rather than query.php (i think that's how you typically retrieve the data, right?) presents a large issue helps me put my request into perspective and I appreciate your response :) On the other hand, tacking on a couple more template options to the right-click menu is likely a relatively simple addition. If you guys need the help, i do know c++ and can wade through c# pretty well, but i can't do much that's complicated. I never offered to help before b/c it seemed you guys had things well covered and only recently ported the code into OOP format, right? I'm confident i could actually implement my changes myself (the menu additions) if i knew exactly how to go about it... never worked on a sourceforge project before. -???????????? ^Babel_Alexandria 00:07, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

It was sort of OOPs before, but the code wasnt the best. Kingboyk has done a lot of reworking of the code to add functionality, speed it up, and make it generally better. I have helped with this also, adding some major new features and so on.

If you wanted to add this yourself, i mean, if you want to do it, or at least make a start, and we can help out as and when, that would be fine. It may be worth looking and having a play with query.php and api.php to check and see if they do what you need to. We do use both the query.php, api.php and loading the actual edit pages to pull off the text, we tend not to really load the actual user view of pages too often for pulling off data. If you checkout a copy of the SVN version, have a play and see where you get.

As for the developer side, our "main/lead" developer, MaxSem, has been away from wikipedia for nearly a month now. Feature requests and bugs tend to really just get done by whoever knows how to do it, or wants to attempt to do it, ie personal preference, not really priority/importance of them.

v4 Beta (Alpha + a few changes) should be pushed out to most users this weekend... (Force upgrade... :D) so we'll see how that comes about. Reedy Boy 09:32, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Bypass redirects

Interface

Sub-paragraph undo

Unicode font support

Prod/AfD buttons

Disambiguation repair using numpad

Im not sure how you'd actually want the keys mapping... --Reedy Boy 20:53, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Just by numbering the first nine options 1 to 9... Typing 5 will use the fifth option. Now you can use home/end and the first letter, which can be annoying if multiple options have the same starting letter. My request on disambiguation: the [done] key has no hot-key likt alt-D. Now I am forced to use the mouse (the tab key will only activate this button after many many button presses). It would be cool to have alt-Done and alt-Cancel available, so you can operate AWB to solve disambigs without the mouse. Yeah, sorry, I hate that mouse and I want to keep RSI/CTS away by keeping on hating it. Edoderoo (talk) 10:58, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Options list

Do you program in C#? Or are you capable at least of designing Windows Forms* in Visual Studio? If you are, perhaps you should join the team. Judging by our efforts up to now we don't have any UI artists aboard. *Or we could go with WPF, which would necessitate a move to .net 3.5, a jump I personally feel we will have to make at some stage... --kingboyk (talk) 12:17, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't know anything about C/C++/C#, yet. But I'd be willing to give the GUI thing as free time becomes available. I assume its part of the Visual Studio package I use to compile AWB.--Dispenser 22:28, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes it is. Windows Forms in Visual Studio is fairly simple if you're sticking to design, don't really need to be able to code much to do the visual part.

The .Net Framework 3.5 introduced design/code seperation I believe, a replacement for Windows Forms called Windows Presentation Foundation and a new markup language (XAML?). I've not tried any of these features yet and we're currently using .Net 2.0 with AWB so we're stuck with Windows Forms unless there's a compelling reason to "upgrade". Visual Studio can do both types of design anyway. --kingboyk (talk) 19:17, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

If you can do the graphical side.. It wouldnt be too hard to tie the backend code into it all... I suspect, looking at that, we're gonna need to make a custom control, probably inheriting from listview/similar... As a list view can do the different types of view like you see in Windows Explorer - Large Icon, Small Icon, Details... I may have a play later on --Reedy Boy 19:33, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Bit of googling/looking about. We are certainly going to need either a custom control, or to write our own. As list views by default do not accept images in the sub items (ie columns other than the first) --Reedy Boy 20:56, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Fixing ambiguous typos

Sounds like an interesting idea. Jogers (talk) 09:10, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

This would be a useful feature, provided that users had an option to 'ignore ambiguous typos' i.e. AWB would not change a word matching an ambiguous typo and would not prompt the user for the correct correction. Otherwise I could envisage users being regularly pestered by message boxes ;) Rjwilmsi (talk) 11:15, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Certainly would, but how about we smarten the regexer as well? "Distict of" is almost certainly "District of" similarly "Business distict" and "congressional distict". I will put some data on Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos/distict. Rich Farmbrough, 14:39, 2 June 2010 (UTC).

P.S. if someone will buy me Google's n-grams I will produce the rules based on them. Rich Farmbrough, 14:39, 2 June 2010 (UTC).

As in [9] ? $150... --Reedy 17:17, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes they are the ones. Rich Farmbrough, 18:18, 2 June 2010 (UTC).

Block and Protection Log Access

[10] would be useful to help with this. --Reedy 16:04, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Bug fixed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:23, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Make the Find and replace dialog not modal

It isn't modal, see Feature Request Modeless Dialog "Text regex" (Couldn't spell). But I have the main window on my first screen and AFAR on the second. Perhaps, you want an always on top feature or a taskbar button?--Dispenser 03:23, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Show rather than show dialog? IIRC? --Reedy 14:52, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I changed it to modal some time ago because when it was non-modal, closing it sometimes resulted in the main being hidden. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 15:16, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I've had this tonight.. --Reedy 21:54, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Allow split-screen mode to see preview and diff at the same time

Support non-standard Windows font PPI

Scrollable Window

To be honest, im not sure about making the whole window scrollable.. Should be doable, would need to try having a play... That a 9/10" screen by any chance? --Reedy 22:37, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I think its a 10" diagonally. Yea, its 10.2" diagonally. OT 22:23, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

I'll have to try it on my 9" eee --Reedy 22:37, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Alright, just post what happens when you do that, I guess. Thanks! OT 02:45, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Suppose i should've posted before, it definately doesn't want to play nice on the smaller screens :( --Reedy 19:19, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

This is related to Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs#AWB_netbook_fail. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:56, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Possibility to set order of automatic operation (Find&Replace, External Proc. etc)

How I imagine it to look like: it would be a little window like F&R one, with rows like there, and easier possibility to move row up or down (=make it be executed earlier or later), delete or temp disable operation. Also, a button "Add operation...", which will allow to add custom bunches of replaces or, if they were deleted form list earlier, General Fixes, External Proc. and others from another list.

It might look like this:

Operation | Description | Minor | | | | | Enabled  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  General Fixes | AWW-specific fixes | ? | | [move up] | [move down] | [delete] | ?  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Find and Repl... | "cat" -> "dog" | ? | [edit] | [move up] | [move down] | [delete] | ?  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  External Proc... | friendlyIbox.rb | ? | [edit] | [move up] | [move down] | [delete] | ?  

Explanation:

Operation

non-editable hard-coded name.

Description

editable, just like regexes in Find and Replace; short user-written desc

Minor

if checked and only fixes are these from minor operations, AWB would skip article.

[edit]

if possible to modify this operation, they will show dialog boxes same as these that appear now when clicking for example Tools -> External Processing

[move up]/[move down]/[delete]

self-explanatory.

Enabled

would work exactly like the ones in Find&Replace dialog.

The dialog may be shown by clicking Tools -> Manage order... or by button placed near Find and Replaces ones.

I hope you like my idea and understand my poor English ;), Matma Rex pl.wiki talk 10:36, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

#Options_list, its a good idea.. but there are some that are supposed to be run before others (but this could be catered for).. All that would technically be necessary would be to turn most of the stuff into individual modules that could be added to a list for processing or similar... --Reedy 10:54, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Aw, I was looking for request like mine, but I couldnt find it (I suggest to archive requests more often ;)). What is supposed to run before others? I have no idead what it can be. And, well, I said it'll be tought, but - I repeat it - I believe in you, developers. Matma Rex pl.wiki talk 11:11, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Haha. People get annoyed if we archive non finished ones ;). I'll combine them later. However, i think this is more a v5+ request.. Hopefully where we'll have *maybe* changed to .NET v3... and can look at improving the gui with the new toys it gives us! --Reedy 11:27, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Move 'Make list' to new dialog

Sounds alright to me... Whats the wider community consensus? --Reedy 13:01, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Some further thoughts:

• I defined 'New list' but not 'Edit list'. An 'Edit list' function needs an 'Edit list' button beneath the list where the 'Filter' button is now.
• 'New list' and 'Edit list' should produce the same dialog. A working name for the dialog should be 'List'.
• The 'List' dialog is the main place for editing lists but removal of articles should be possible in the main AWB interface.
• The right-mouse menus throughout AWB could do with a review. The right-mouse menu in the current list has 'Filter', 'Save list', and 'Sort alphabetically'. If this design idea goes further, I suggest eliminating those three options.

Lightmouse (talk) 15:25, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

This feature request has been hanging around for 21 months. Any further thoughts? Lightmouse (talk) 17:35, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

I thought are files were settings with lists included and not lists. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:39, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

That could work. Lightmouse (talk) 19:19, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Could we start by designing an 'New list' dialog as described above? Lightmouse (talk) 16:51, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

User contribs tab

I wouldn't want to use a separate browser for this... Im wondering about combining the history and WLH here ones and having like radio buttons to select or something... --Reedy 17:06, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, having one browser would be simpler. You could then disable the user contributions option for non-user (talk) space. It's not urgent, I can use my local version to do the few I'm interested in at the moment. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 17:17, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Live view tab

There was a request for something like this using something that could potentially done internally.. --Reedy 11:39, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

hmm...? -???????????? ^Babel_Alexandria 12:17, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Feature_requests#Fast_previewing --Reedy 12:20, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

actually what i'm asking for is very different than Instaview. I want to, specifically, be able to see the image located at Image:Foo without having to open an external window. -???????????? ^Babel_Alexandria 18:35, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Search within 'Make module'.

Code already exists to do this (just not on the custom module).. Any suggestions how to do it designer wise? Do we need a Find form creating..? --Reedy 19:28, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Interesting predecessors include

• the method that AWB already has below the 'Save' button. Perhaps you could just copy that or update it with ideas from the other predecessors below.
• MS Word is interesting in that 'Find' and 'Replace' are just tabs combined into one dialog. So it is easy to start with Find and then decide to use Replace.
• MS Notepad is very simple but can be irritating - it does not search the whole thing like MS Word does. You have to search forward from where you are, or then backward from where you are.
• Firefox is instant search and has a very small field tucked away

You could add some menus to the 'Make module' page and then have the 'Find' menu item in one of them. I instinctively use 'Ctrl-F' to get 'Find' or 'Ctrl-H' to get 'Replace'. Lightmouse (talk) 20:09, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Precisely. --Reedy 20:14, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I think a dialog like the MS Word dialog would be good. You could enable it on Ctrl-F even without menus for now. You could use the same dialog in both places. This would allow you to remove the field from below the Save button. Lightmouse (talk) 20:48, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Dialogs are so passé. Firefox's find toolbar is what we should be aiming at, but safari has such cool effect (it dims all non highlighted words). Visual Studio has some cool options, but isn't as powerful as notepad++. I believe I had add Ctrl-F and a few other shortcuts in one of my uncommitted patches.--Dispenser 04:44, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

You are right, Firefox is better, although MSWord integrates 'Find' and 'Replace' very well. It would be good if the AWB solution could do that. Lightmouse (talk) 12:50, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

What i dont get, is why the .NET framework doesnt have a standard FaR contorl that can be reused. I suppose, its probably worth trying to make up a decent one we can reuse throughout AWB... Hmmm --Reedy 12:55, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

AWB is not an IDE for development of plug-ins or custom modules, therefore I don't think that this feature should be a high priority. Anybody who wishes to improve their custom module can use their own text editor or IDE to work on it. Rjwilmsi 19:33, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

If this is unlikely to be done, feel free to delete it as 'will not do'. Lightmouse (talk) 13:18, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Snippets from DB search

More special pages

We're waiting on [11]. As said before, i am not HTML scraping (not worth the hassle). So this will be resolve when the bug gets sorted on the MW side --Reedy 12:23, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Okay; thanks. -Drilnoth (T o C) 12:34, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Bug fixed. ^Avic_ennasis @ 10:58, 3 Elul 5771 / 10:58, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

Localhost

I'm presuming it whinges about the domain name/similar? (Tbh, never tried a localhost server... Have you tried 127.0.0.1 also?) --Reedy 19:01, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

I've tried both localhost and 127.0.0.1, and the error message it gives is: "An error occured while connecting to the server or loading project information from it. Please make sure your Internet connection works and that combination of project/language exist. Enter the URL in the format en.wikipedia.org/w (including the directory where index.php and api.pho reside)." Thanks, Genius101^Guestbook 20:25, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Did you create Project:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage? -Drilnoth (T o C o L) 22:48, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, this seems to be an error that must have something to do with the last version on the AWB?

--69.143.206.55 (talk) 04:23, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Provide "Move image" functionality

Is move images enabled again? --Reedy 17:06, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

MW doesn't support move image. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:37, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

well i figured that since AWB is running on the client side, it could work around MW's constraints. The image and info would be stored temporarily on the user's hard drive. of course maybe this is better handled by a script like twinkle or friendly. --???????????? ^Babel_Alexandria 23:29, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Provide a separate checkbox for "Incorrect phrases" during Regex typo fixing

Fronds ofc does something like this.. Its whether you wanted the audit trail and it kept onwiki. --Reedy 06:14, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Well there's some disagreement as to whether phrases should be included with typo fixing. I'm leaning towards the no side, but some people like them. So I figured the best of both worlds could be included with a further check box. I would say suggest default to off. -xeno^talk 12:39, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

FYI, someone at the discussion was concerned that Fronds was in its infancy and thus wouldn't be as effective as it being built into the typo matrix. -xeno^talk 13:17, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

Admittedly so (think "Who bought the first telephone?"). - Jarry1250 ^{[ In the UK? Sign the petition! ]} 15:29, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Probably someone who wanted to ring up 'ole Al. -xeno^talk 19:41, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

If maxlag exceeded more than 10 times, pause for a lengthy period rather than terminating operation

I'm not sure how Web Browser AWB will benefit from this. </sarcasm> ;D --Reedy 21:43, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Server has been so gorram lagged these days. -xeno^talk 18:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

• I'm not sure if you guys killed the maxlag features with fire or whatever, but I rather liked being able to "let my bot loose" as it were and let maxlag act as a leash. So maybe having maxlag as an option to enable would be cool. -xeno^talk 15:00, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Unload plugins

Ability to resize either list window for at Make List or in List comparer, or a scrollable window

I was about to post a request regarding the same issue. In the list comparer, one can hover over a long page title in either input list and see the full page name on a mouseover. The Results lists do not have this feature; the full title of a page in one of these lists can therefore only be seen by saving the list to a text file. Can a mouseover text (or alternatively a scroll bar, as requested above) be added to the three "Results" lists in the list comparer? SiBr₄ (talk) 19:58, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

Add ctrl+c, ctr+x, ctrl+a shortcuts to log lists

Also ctrl+c to the diff window. I don't know how many times I've highlighted some text in the diff window (it's easy because what I want is usually already highlighted in part by the differencing code so I don't have to try to find the same thing in the edit window), ctrl+c then go to the regex tester or wherever then ctrl+v the wrong stuff. Argh!

--Trappist the monk (talk) 00:00, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Allow more granular control of Preference "Enable logging"

Smarter AWBupdater

Searching information on pages to modify other pages

Save and load settings from wiki page

Do you mean a physical [[File:]] - Of course, using the relative file location will let you do it, with MaxSems warning... --Reedy 14:47, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, no, I meant 'page'. -xeno^talk 14:56, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

So the text from a specified wiki page? --Reedy 11:50, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, like wrapped in <source lang=xml> tags or whatever. -xeno^talk 03:50, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Someone post a settings file -> Save as in a text file -> Load settings. :D You would like to skip step 2. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:01, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Well, the real reason is so that I don't have to email myself settings file back and forth between locations when I'm in the middle of a task. -xeno^talk 13:10, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

This or a similar feature would be very useful. For example me and some other users maintain a list of regular expressions at Commons:File description page regular expressions (XML) and it would be really cool if the finds and replaces in it could automatically be loaded by all our bots at startup, kind of like what's done for typos. - EdoDodo ^talk 09:52, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Ability to save the state of the database scanner

Yes, especially the default .xml path + namespaces to keep. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:16, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Have navigable TOC for edit box

Filter on timestamp--last edited

Trivial, yup. PageInfo gives us the last edited timestamp. If someone can suggest a good place to add this, and what to do about date formats etc, I'll get this added. --Reedy 06:31, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

This appears very similar to the previous feature request called History analysis. Is it worth solving them both together? Lightmouse (talk) 17:38, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

In the 'Filter' there is a tick box option called 'Sort alphabetically'. I suggest that we turn that into three option buttons labelled: 'Do not sort', 'Sort alphabetically', and 'Sort by date of last edit'.

It would also be useful to have date fields labelled 'Remove articles with last edit after' and 'Remove articles with last edit before'

At the same time, I'd review the 'Keep alphabetized' option in the 'List menu'. I'm not sure what it does and perhaps it could be removed or have another option relating to the new chronological sort.

Regards Lightmouse (talk) 11:54, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Any further thoughts on this? Lightmouse (talk) 12:16, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

The two sections History analysis and Filter on timestamp--last edited both want to investigate article history. Any further thoughts on these two requests? Lightmouse (talk) 18:53, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Multiple typo lists

Flexible starting point for very large lists

Prevent the article from being saved if a condition exists

This could be a plug-in I guess. It would create a additional rules dialog analogous to advanced settings. The dialog would allow the user to enter some number of rules (regular expressions) paired with an error messages. The text would be evaluated when the Save button is pressed. If a condition exists in the text which violates one of the rules then:

1. The save is aborted.
2. The first instance of violating text is highlighted as with the highlight errors option in the Options Menu.
3. An error dialog is displayed containing the paired error message.
4. If in bot mode, or at the users discretion, the page is skipped and the error message entered in the skipped log.
5. This process is repeated until the text does not violate any of the rules.

Perhaps a check box could be added to the rules dialog that would prevent saving when an error exists of the type highlighted by the existing highlight errors option. This might also include the option of skipping and logging the error type.

The highlight color should probably be different than the red used by the highlight errors option. Some striking color that could not be confused with red but does not obscure the text.

The motivation is that it is possible to detect situations that are ambiguous and need human attention. In the past I've created rules that inserted brackets that created an open bracket error. On re-parsing the bracket errors where highlighted and allowed me to handle the case manually. It's a laborious process that is prone to failure.

I hope that this was not already suggested and declined and that it is not too much to ask for.  -droll [chat] 06:25, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

The interface might not have to change much. Maybe add a rule type to advanced settings that implements the functionality.  -droll [chat] 03:29, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

Search by namespace

Bencherlite Can't you just filter namespaces by using the filter? -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:02, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

I know that feature exists, but If I'm looking for all the particular instances of phrase in article space, for instance, wouldn't it be easier to specify that I want only article space instances to start with? Otherwise I hit the 1,000 limit with irrelevant namespaces. E.g. I search for "March 3" and after filtering only 824 - not far off 20% - of the hits are in article space. Bencherlite^Talk 13:08, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Default directory for settings

I use many different settings files, so this would be very useful to save a little directory navigation. (It would be especially helpful when running more than one instance of AWB simultaneously, as "Recent settings" only works initially for the first. This specific issue may only be relevant with snapshots which are debug builds; I'm currently using SVN 6872.) MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 21:41, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

I concur with this request. Every time I go to open or save settings, it doesn't remember what directory I last pulled from. This is unlike most other Windows apps I use. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk o Work} 15:40, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Selective undo of changes from diff window

You can double-click any change in the diff window and it will be undone.--Chowbok ? 08:40, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

As long as you realize that that undoes all the changes in the paragraph. --Auntof6 (talk) 16:15, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, that's definitely helpful. Though, a more localized undo (ie, the exact change clicked on) would still be useful I think. David Hollman (Talk) 16:33, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

...and as long as you realize that double-clicking on any change in the diff window (or making any change in the edit box) wipes out all the automated messages that get added to the edit summary (e.g. typo fixes, replacements, addition/removal of templates), which is a bummer. GoingBatty (talk) 01:22, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Maybe it would be possible to allow line by line removal instead of having to remove the whole paragraph? --Kumioko (talk) 02:25, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

It is line by line, but in the code, one line usually contains the whole paragraph. Do you mean sentence by sentence? Svick (talk) 18:31, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Change by change removal would be wonderful, as even one sentence may have more than one change. GoingBatty (talk) 20:12, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

It doesn't just show the paragraph containing the diff. It also puts paragraphs either side that have no diff. These provide some context but use up a lot of space. Can these non-diff paragraphs be reduced in size?

Perhaps allow the user to specify? --Kumioko (talk) 17:25, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

It might also be helpful to have an "undo like" capability that would allow the user to deselect all changes like on an article..(for example if AWB suggested a bunch of typo changes the user could select the undo like option to uncheck all the top changes). --Kumioko (talk) 17:25, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Restoring content of the regex tester

Request of CheckPage feature to make it more easily maintainable (generall access option)

Allow non-bots to use Auto Shutdown feature

Allow list to be sent to Special:Export and resulting xml automatically loaded in database scanner

Lose work on "restart"/"timeout

This happens to me too and I find it very discouraging. I spend considerable time on an article only to have the changes disappear. It is not always related a long period of inactivity on my part. Is the edit box content saved anywhere on my computer where it can be retrieved after restart? -droll [chat] 06:24, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Have Filter window remember from one time to the next if it was set to "Intersection"

Reedy this may be a bug? -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:07, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

Add option 'Open diff in browser' for log.

Add option to increase visible size of log

Lightmouse You can press F10 and the Edit box/Log box will enlarge. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:40, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Alow creating lists based on external web pages

Proxy Authentication

Using pre-parse mode without logging in

This has already been requested and is waiting for a developer review. I would like to have this option available too. -- Ganeshk (talk) 03:18, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

I also requested this some time ago as well. If I remember correctly it can't be done because of the Wikipedia API. In order for AWB to connect to WP it needs to use a login through the API. I can't remember exactly but I think thats how it was explained to me a while back. --Kumioko (talk) 04:03, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

So perhaps a slightly revised feature request would solve this: to allow pre-parse mode (only) if logged in with an account that has no AWB permission? -- John of Reading (talk) 08:13, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Minimialise the config stuff on bottom half of screen

Built in AWB functions

Edit summary

Provide ability for edit summary to change dynamically based on what custom Find & Replace changes are made

Example: "(Bot) Tagging for WP:FOO - Inherited $1-class assessment from other projects"

Find and replace already records replacements and removals. Plus, it has notes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:48, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Only in the normal Find and replace though and in any case this wouldn't allow for what I've shown above as an example. -xeno^talk 16:50, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

This would be very useful to me too. Imagine you have a list of pages (from a cat or something) and you want to do task A to pages matching condition A and Task B to pages matching condition B. At the moment you can do this easily using advance find and replace but you have to use one edit summary for all the edits, or continually change it. Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 08:47, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

My longest edit summary is something like WP:GenFixes, ref cleanup, parse authN/edN, cmn/reflist|2/3->30/20em, {{LMR??J/up}}. I (and others) would find it useful to automatically select only the relevant changes. Also, the edit summary dropdown is so short that it makes selecting the most appropriate (long) edit summary tedious.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ?contribs ?dgaf)  13:34, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Dynamically change edit summary based on its length

One space-saving measure would be to remove the spaces surrounding the arrow in typo replacements: "againt->against" instead of "againt -> against".

Some (most?) people prefer the visual appeal of "using [[Project:AWB|AWB]]" to "using [[Project:AWB]]". With this feature, the prettier version could be used most of the time while not wasting those valuable characters when necessary, and the space-saving version could be even further shortened by removing "using". Make it simply " ([[Project:AWB]])".

I already do something similar. When I'm fixing typos, my normal edit summary is [[WP:AWB/T|Typo patrol]]. When there are so many typos that the list is truncated, I clear my edit summary to allow more of the list to show. Note a bug in my example diff: the "[[Project:AWB]]" got lopped off. MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 22:05, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree with that. Pipe Project AWB if edit summary has enough space. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:44, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Add ellipsis to truncated edit summaries

Smarter edit summaries

I'm pretty sure implementing this won't be easy, but I think it could be done in the long term. Svick (talk) 23:35, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

I think it should be doable. Certainly is in no shape or form easy. --Reedy 22:23, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Sometimes when I have undone a change, I forget to revise the edit summary accordingly. It sure would be nice if it were updated automatically. It would probably be easier to implement if these automatic updates would work only if the user hasn't already altered the edit summary for a specific list item. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk o Work} 15:48, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Edit summary when I use find and replace on ar.wiki

I think this would be worth doing for all the wiki's where we have the different namesapces. It would only require a few code changes, ie instead f Replaced, use Variables.Replace (or whatever), and then have the local word for each... Reedy Boy 08:46, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Not exactly. Replacing right arrow with left one can give you weird results if you've replaced one non-RTL word with another[13]. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 20:04, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

What about using the Arabic word for "with" -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:19, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

It's "??".--OsamaK 23:44, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Include more additions/changes in edit summary

You can construct your own edit summaries using Custom module. I agree with the first one though. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:35, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

My goal isn't to change the existing rules, but to have the edit summary that is automatically generated better reflect the changes that are made. Took a quick look at Custom Modules, but didn't see an example of one that with logic such as: if (something) is added, then include (some text) in the edit summary. GoingBatty (talk) 17:54, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Use something like this to begin:

• Summary = "StartSummary"

and call a function inside an if..then statement adding:

• Summary += MoreSummary + @", ";

I guess Rjw can give you more specific instructions.

The first one is good because adding persondata is an improvement and not a fix. The others go a bit off our philosophy, because generating lentghy edit summaries can be time consuming and endless. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:11, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Automatically change edit summary based on rule applied

I think it is not hard to do, but very useful (at least for me). For example if changes are made using rule "1" the edit summary is "Bot - links to years removed", if changes are made using rule "2" it is "Bot - original title removed from the table of the movie". So my bot has to scan the "Category Film" just once, and it can do automatically more different replacements.
Thank you. User:FRacco --BRacco (bot) (talk) 17:10, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Append guidelines/policies to edit summary

Dynamic edit summary with external process

@Green Cardamom: I hope you're also aware of the Options->Default Edit Summaries functionality, which allows you to have multiple edit summaries and choose the appropriate one before saving each edit. GoingBatty (talk) 02:55, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes thanks. I'm using an external script (Tools->External processing) and would like the script to choose the edit summary. So I don't have to manually. This could be simply accomplished by adding a second "Input/Output filename" field in the Tools->External processing menu for the edit summary filename. -- GreenC 13:17, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

Solution using custom module

The solution I'm using for years now is to have custom C# snippet (Tools/Make module) to call external filters. Here is an example.. It solves multiple common external filters issues in AWB:

• provides support for summary file
• provides a command line template, to allow sending extra arguments to external script. Most useful are: article title (URL escaped, to allow safe transfer of UTF strings) and article namespace.
• allows for custom control of child process creation details (e.g. minimized or no window at all)

That way, any script/languague/framework with CLI interface can be used to write a powerful external filter. Personally, I'm using PHP scripts most often, which allows for MW API calls, caching, functional regex replacements, transformations requiring parsing of wikimarkup and so on.

The only issue I know is, that System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode() method requires System.Web assembly to be loaded. Which fortunately is the case in AWB, after logging into some wiki.

Maybe this kind of solution can be integrated directly into AWB, it's quite trivial, yet considerably more powerful than current external processing support. --Teslaton (talk) 14:02, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Support for Wikipedia books

New source: Books

Basic cleanup for books

Headbomb maybe you should ask a bot to do these for starts? -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:19, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Talk page related

Edit talk - view article

Expand template redirect functionality to talk pages (zeroth section only)

I like this idea too. Kumioko (talk) 03:25, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I thought you had posted this idea somewhere, but couldn't find it, so I added it here. GoingBatty (talk) 03:47, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

BTW I have already written written code for most of the Wikiprojects and redirects. If the logic for the AWB/TR page were updated to include talk pages or if another separate page were created for talk pages, I think it would be very beneficial and would be easy to convert the code I wrote over to the new format.Kumioko (talk) 13:38, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

I changed the title to really correspond to what is to be done. We need substitutions only to zeroth section. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:42, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Alerts

More detail for PUA

bad categories to show in alert box

Keep "delink selection" button available even when no multiple wiki-links

Alert: {{s-start}} with no {{s-end}}

Alert: Stub category directly added

What logic will identify all such stub categories? Rjwilmsi 20:52, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Categories ending with " stubs" would get most of them. GoingBatty (talk) 03:42, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

HotCat now disallows directly adding -stub categories. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:36, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

FYI, using a regex search of the March 4 database dump, I found 2,292 instances of \[\[Category:[\w\s]+stubs\]\] in mainspace (excluding comments). GoingBatty (talk) 00:01, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Alert for interwikis (prev. Remove interwiki functionality)

It probably should be removed, but when is the question. Wikidata isn't being pushed to all the other different language Wikipedias until sometime in March. It's going to take at least several months before the bots clean everything up. After that, the bots need to start automatically adding new articles into Wikidata. As long as no harm is being done, probably keep the code around for awhile... better safe than sorry. Bgwhite (talk) 20:43, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Agreed there's no rush - just recorded the thought while I was here. GoingBatty (talk) 01:58, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Do wikias use interwikis? AWB is a general tool and not only for the English Wikipedia. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:19, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Another thought: would it be worth adding an alert when an article does have interwikis? An editor could choose whether to try to clean it up. --Auntof6 (talk) 05:41, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

We have a winner. An extremely excellent idea. FYI... I think the bots are done removing interwiki links from articles and have moved on to other spaces. I see one doing categories right now. For anything left in article space, the bot either had problems moving the links (two links going to same language for example) or the wikidata entry hasn't been made in Wikidata. Phase 2 of Wikidata went live yesterday to 11 wikipedias. This should cause the demise of Persondata and make life a living hell for infoboxes. Bgwhite (talk) 06:54, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Alert: Unbalanced comment

rev 9507 Alert for unbalanced comments. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:56, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Doesn't work with svn9507. See 2013 NRL season or 2013-14 British and Irish Cup Bgwhite (talk) 04:26, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Provide options to hide & limit the list of multiple wiki-links

Autotagger

Replace/remove {{Uncategorized}} when categories exist

These categories should not be hidden categories, maintance categories nor stub categories. Any rule when exactly the article is considered "categorised"? -- Magioladitis (talk) 02:59, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

If it's in at least one true content category, it's considered categorized (though {{cat improve}} may still be appropriate, such as if an article's only content categories are birth/death years.) You're correct that hidden/maintenance/stub categories don't count toward the article being considered categorized, if they're the only categories present. Bearcat (talk) 03:56, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Enhanced Autotagging

Support I would like to ask for the enhanced autotagger too. I have been using the AWB on Wikia, and I would like to be able to use the autotagger for the placing/removing of the stub tag only, because the tags such as uncategorised, orphan or deadend aren't mostly used on Wikia. -- Spike144 (talk) 12:25, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Support Using AWB at Wikia with the auto tag option checked is an all or nothing option. It appears however that many of the options are specific to Wikipedia such as wanting to add {{orphan}} to seemingly every page which makes the feature pretty much useless. I see that there is a tab under preferences that allows the alerts to be selected if desired and I wanted to ask if the same thing could be done to the Auto tagger function so that projects can decide which ones they want to use since it may apply to some (although most don't use it). Reguyla (talk) 00:29, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

Change uncat with Cat improve, if page contains only Living people, births, deaths categories

That would be cat improve, but let's keep that consideration for another time. Rjwilmsi 09:00, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Add {{cat improve}} if the only categories are Category:Living people, Category:xxxx births, Category:xxxx deaths, and/or maintenance & hidden categories. GoingBatty (talk).

Change Expand section with Empty section in empty section

Add {{Cleanup-HTML}}

I would first like to see the template documentation provide a complete list of what is and isn't permitted HTML tagging in Wikipedia. Currently it's unclear. Rjwilmsi 10:14, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Example -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:00, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Example2. -- 15:04, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

Example 3. I fixed some but there some unclosed bold tags. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:14, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

@GoingBatty and Rjwilmsi: I suggest that we add this template when h2, h3, etc. tags are found in page. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:58, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: Could AWB General fixes be changed to automatically change <h2>Section header</h2> to ==Section header== ? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 00:46, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Add {{cleanup-bare URLs}}

Changed request from {{cleanup-link rot}} to its new name: {{cleanup-bare URLs}}. GoingBatty (talk) 00:04, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Change {{unreferenced section}} to {{refimprove section}}

How can we know that? -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:11, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Using the same logic as when changing {{unreferenced}} to {{refimprove}}, but only looking between {{unreferenced section}} and the next section header? Or by looking for <ref> between {{unreferenced section}} and the next section header? GoingBatty (talk) 01:44, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

I mean: It was risky before already. In the ref can only be a comment and not a real reference. --- Magioladitis (talk) 20:11, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

But that would be easy to be implemented by checking if the ref has a url/or a cite template in, or? mabdul 20:16, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

It is not required that a ref have a cite template, & quite a number of refs do not, from both new and experienced users. . I , for example, never use it unless there are already refs in the article formatted with it. DGG ( talk ) 16:23, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

@DGG and Mabdul: This issue hasn't been discussed in over 3 years, but I have made a related bot request: WP:Bot requests#Can_outdated_.7B.7Bunreferenced_section.7D.7D_tags_be_automatically_removed.3F. Jarble (talk) 04:15, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Remove {{Stub}} when a more fine-grained stub tag already exists on the page

Make List

Add Special:PagesWithProp to "Special Pages" dropdown list.

Should be trivial. Already has an API module for it https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Bpageswithprop Reedy (talk) 20:51, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Add some options to the Make list option

All those are available on https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Bquerypage I believe now... So should be reasonable to do. Reedy (talk) 20:53, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

CirrusSearch

Figured out how to make this work but it is a bit weird. --  Gadget850 ^talk 10:42, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Gadget850 you can help us by writing how you did it. -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:52, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: Does this help? -- John of Reading (talk) 11:10, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

John of Reading thanks! I wonder if we should something in the manual and in which place. There were a lot of questions/requests/complains about CirrusSearch. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:12, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

If I do an on-wiki search for insource:/\<center\>\<gallery/i I get 38 pages (seems like it always reports one more than actual). If I do the same search in AWB I get 0 pages. If I search wiki or AWB for "gallery" insource:/\<center\>\<gallery/i I get 17 pages. If I search for "e" insource:/\<center\>\<gallery/i I get 22 pages (e is the most common letter in the English alphabet). If I search for "a" insource:/\<center\>\<gallery/i I get 37 pages (a is the second most common letter in the English alphabet). I don't understand why AWB needs this prefixed search. There were issues with insource searches when CS was first introduced, but they seem to have been resolved. --  Gadget850 ^talk 11:39, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

@Reedy: -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:41, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srwhat=text&srlimit=max&srsearch=insource:/\%3Ccenter\%3E\%3Cgallery/i vs https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srwhat=text&srsearch=%27insource%3a%2f%5c%3Ccenter%5c%3E%5c%3Cgallery%2fi%27&srlimit=max - It seems the html encoding screws it up... Reedy (talk) 19:01, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Should I open a new bug on this? --  Gadget850 ^talk 19:45, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

T92776 Reedy (talk) 20:50, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Unsorted

On exit, check for changes to settings and query whether user wants to save the changes

This is a very useful proposal, however checking for changes the right way (e.g. by serialising settings and comparing against saved ones) is a heavy operation. Needs more thinking. MaxSem^{(Han shot first!)} 08:23, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Perhaps we could divide the request into several pieces. For example, changes to the 'Make module' could be one problem piece to solve and changes to checkbox options in the tabs could be another problem piece. I would regard it as a useful advance if you could solve either of those problem pieces. Lightmouse (talk) 08:39, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Please delete this request. It's resolved by the 'auto-save' feature. Lightmouse (talk) 11:31, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Hold on. I often make incremental adjustments to "Find & Replace" while processing a list of articles, and don't want to save new settings until they are tested on a few articles, so I would not have 'auto-save' turned on in that situation. Before exiting AWB or before loading a new settings file, I would like to be reminded that I have unsaved "Find & Replace" changes to the current settings file. This part should not be difficult to implement, especially if the request for "Unwanted saving of Find & Replace changes" is taken care of by dropping the "Done" button and adding "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons. If the "Apply" button is pressed, just make a note that the settings file has changed and may need to be saved on exit; the heavy operation of comparing settings against saved ones would not be necessary. A similar technique could be used to mark changes to skip options, etc., and all the checks would not have to be added at once. Chris the speller ^yack 14:53, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Multiple page moves

Possibly best implemented as a MassMove plugin... (could be a default ship plugin with AWB though) --Reedy 22:25, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Define space in lines/paragraphs between Multiply links

What? Plrk (talk) 15:10, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

i believe gnevin is asking that users have a way to say how close multiple wikilinks have to be to eachother before AWB complains about them. -???????????? ^Babel_Alexandria 16:52, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

As Zapper says , sorry for not being clearer Gnevin (talk) 21:58, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Lines depend on resolution... Hm... an idea would that in the Multiple wikilinks box to have not only number of occurrences but minimum distance in terms of words too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:25, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Internationalisation and localisation

You can use it on any language (as of the svn version), just the interface isn't localised. --Reedy 11:06, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

As an aside. We have thought about it, and it would be a good idea. It just would require a lot of reworking of the code, and the interface changing to cater for the larger text aswell... Getting translators would be easy enough, i suspect... --Reedy 11:13, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I haven't found an easy to #Support non-standard Windows font PPI since the window resizing modes doesn't seem to have an "em" mode. The best I've been able to come up with is using dymaic layout boxes, but that tends to slows redrawing.--Dispenser 16:48, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

+1. Helder 18:21, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

We now provide edit summaries in many languages and the set of rules are better localised for the various projects. I call for help in order to expand the localised edit settings to more languages. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:52, 15 August 2013 (UTC)

Article page in disambiguation popup

History analysis

This appears to be similar to Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Archive_19#Filtering_based_on_history. Lightmouse (talk) 10:41, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

This feature would be very useful for bots to filter out articles that it has already edited so it can avoid editing an article for a second time. For example, in some scenarios the bot makes a false positive edit, then a user reverts the bot, then the bot makes the same edit again. I would like to be able to see if the history contains the bot user name but it would be useful to test for any string in the history. I imagine the interface as similar to the 'article contains', 'article does not contain' code. Is it possible? Lightmouse (talk) 07:38, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

It probably depends on whether the mediawiki API has a feature whereby it will tell us how many times a given user (or bot user) has edited a page. If that's available then we could certainly have an option "skip if I've already edited this page". Searching a history for a string doesn't sound feasible: the history of some pages is 50 edits per day, so AWB could easily spend several minutes working through the last two months of a page history. Rjwilmsi 22:27, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Also, you'd probably want some time constraint on it. You may have not touched it for 2 years, so missing out on those edits would therefore be bad... It may be possible to query the API (ie have to ask Roan nicely to do it), to be able to specify a date, and a username and return whether the user account has touched that page since that date... *May*. As per prior mentions, i'm NOT html scraping. I'll stick a bugzilla request on and see (or ask Roan on IRC).. --Reedy 11:25, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

prop=revision&rvstart=timestamp&rvend=timestamp2&rvuser=username&rvlimit=1

omitting rvstart (prop=revision&rvend=timestamp&rvuser=username&rvlimit=1), will give all (if any) edits by that user to the page since the date. It's possible --Reedy 11:28, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

The two sections History analysis and Filter on timestamp--last edited both want to investigate article history. Any further thoughts on these two requests? Lightmouse (talk) 18:52, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

search individual templates

I think we can do with the Advanced find in replace. Create rules and subrules. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:31, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

I can't think of a way to do that, since the searches are global. kwami (talk) 23:31, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Interestingly, I'm currently working on a plugin which will focus on doing things in specific places within templates, with a UI to help define the template, parameter and values which need attention. Might this be of interest? ClickRick (talk) 23:37, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Screenshot at File:TheTemplator.png so you can get an idea of what I'm offering. ClickRick (talk) 23:58, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that looks like it might do it. But it would still be nice to have a simple check box to restrict the find-replace to the template that matches the if/not conditions. kwami (talk) 08:53, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

If I want to make changes in a specific template I am doing the following: Find and replace -> Advanced settings -> New Rule -> If contains -> Infobox Example and then I am creating subrules. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:29, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

But if the page contains a template that contains your search string, then the substitution will be made in all templates on the page, not just the one that contains the string. So if I change apostrophes, I mess up formatting in all of the info boxes. kwami (talk) 08:53, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Try a regex like \{\{IPA\|([^\}]*)\'([^\}]*)\}\} to $1[whatever you're replacing ' with]$2. I'm sure there are much more elegant ways. --NE2 21:07, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

That works! Thanks. A feature option would still be nice, but with this I can at least take care of some of the more grievous problems. kwami (talk) 07:56, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Namespace-insensitive list sorting or add talk page after article

I'm working on sets of pages where I fix/add DEFAULTSORT and also work on the corresponding talk page, adding WPBiography if missing and fixing/adding the listas and living parameters. It would be very convenient to have the pages sorted together so I can manually apply any nonstandard DEFAULTSORT which I find in the article to the listas, and also determine the living status from the article to fill in for WPBiography. Or, if I find that the article's not a bio, I can immediately skip the talk page. MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 00:18, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

This is such a useful feature for me that I wrote a simple external program to do it and I paste the list into AWB. But it would still be very convenient for AWB to do this. MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 20:22, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Reverse order in statistics box for ar.wiki

English variations

Standardise redirects I

What would be a purpose of that? Most changes AWB does make some visible change to the edited page. Also see rule #4. Svick (talk) 13:31, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Not all changes are visible, such as avoiding redirects to {{Citation needed}}. There are many edits that AWB does that qualify for rule 4 if only done by themselves. However, if all these changes were made to a redirect page, as well as edits to categorisation, interwiki links and other existing changes, it could be beneficial. Removing pointless extra text in a redirect page is useful, as it is completely unnecessary and could possibly be vandalism. McLerristarr / Mclay1 15:53, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

I would like to see some estimate on the number of pages with lowercase redirect. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:06, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Correct date when following the

Correct --

I think it should correc to an unspaced emdash. It's usually what is mean in my experience. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:07, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

There's no reason to make that assumption. If the writer has included spaces, the fix should leave them in. It would mean the same thing, so it's best just to leave the writer's stylistic choice alone in an automatic edit. McLerristarr | Mclay1 07:43, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Auto-replace direct use of stub categories with stub templates

I also think that Category:Stubs->{{stub}} should be hard coded into the software. ??? ????? Od Mishehu 12:56, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Any estimate of how many pages have this mistake at the moment? -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:04, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Database reports/Stubs included directly in stub categories - the most recent list has 1438, the recent lists were 1601, 1668 and 1740 respectively. (Note that the 13 October list doesn't count, due to the Darius Dhlomo copyvio problem; such pages were removed from subsequent reports.) This report isn't quite complete - some times, a page will have both a stub tag and a direct use of a stub category (such as this revision), and those won't be listed there. ??? ????? Od Mishehu 13:37, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, but we can't fix more than the "Stubs" one and this report includes subcategories too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:54, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Magio since I haven't yet looked at this let's not draw any early conclusions about what is feasible. Rjwilmsi 20:53, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

I have never seen the code for AWB, but given that AWB has the functionality for parsing page code, and for looking for specific parameters, I would imagine that it's not too hard. ??? ????? Od Mishehu 12:17, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Add non-breaking space before endash

Remove categories if Persondata populated

If we know a year and page is in YOB unknown, it's a disaster. -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:46, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

I agree, and I'd like AWB to be able to fix that disaster. GoingBatty (talk) 02:02, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Consolidate multiple {{Redirect}} templates

Rule: If two redirect templates exist and first parameter is the same then merge: {{Redirect|foo|bar1|bar2}}{{Redirect|foo|bar3|bar4}} ->{{Redirect|foo|bar1|bar2|bar3|bar4}} -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:38, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Consolidate multiple {{Commons category}} templates into {{Commons category multi}}

While there is already Parsers.MergeTemplatesBySection() for {{Commons category}} we would need to only merge uses with one argument, and rename to {{Commons category multi}}. Rjwilmsi 18:16, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Non-breaking spaces before slashes

But without creating stuff like <blacklisted url redacted upon arhciving, see migrated task on Phabricator> . Rich Farmbrough, 03:49, 7 February 2011 (UTC).

Move infobox above article text in lead section

Enhance logic for removing duplicated categories (CHECKWIKI error 17)

Do the same if key is part of DEFAULTSORT. [14] -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:58, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Eponymous category sorting

-- Black Falcon ^(talk) 21:46, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree, in page named "Foo" category "Foo" should have empty sortkey i.e. [[Category:Foo| ]]. This will enable us fix duplicated categories like here and here. -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:58, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Case senstive filter

Allow on-site saving of lists

Doing save to site would be rather trivial... We should probably add a load from page type feature to compliment this.. Though, saved in the correct format, links on page would work. Reedy (talk) 21:21, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

I see no reason to create a new load option here - saving as a wikitext format should allow current load options to be good enough. ??? ????? Od Mishehu 11:51, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Convert template list entries to /doc subpages

List building a query function for API

Create a list of all pages in the last # of day(s) or since last run.

Filters before running the list maker

Hmm. Something like List --> Filter out non mainspace and Filter duplicates (they run when new stuff has been added).. --Reedy 22:35, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Tried that...when I selected "filter non-mainspace", it returned nothing. I wanted the categories alone to pull up (select category check on the List - filter option). Regards, Ganeshk (talk) 22:47, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, what im meaning, is something "like" that needs adding. --Reedy 23:08, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps it might be worth considering have a separate list maker dialog. This would be equivalent to the 'Open' file dialog in other applications. Then you could have more room for options such as this request for pre-filtration. I would suggest merging it with the similar functionality of the 'List comparer'. I am always looking for improvements that will firstly make the terminology and interaction similar to other applications and secondly give more space for the working areas. Lightmouse (talk) 11:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

It would be easy enough to add on the special filter a checkbox to say, apply this filter whenever new articles are added to the List Maker... That saves other real-estate, and puts it in a relevant place? --Reedy 22:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it would :P -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:43, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Some of this can be done with "Special pages" dialog. Rich Farmbrough, 10:16, 14 May 2010 (UTC).

Preserve manual edits when page reloads

I don't really consider AWB a tool for making significant manual edits to a page - rather to make the same or very similar edits to a number of pages. Still, others could use it this way. Rjwilmsi 09:37, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Well, I want this feature badly ;-). I frequently encounter this problem. Rjwilmsi, talking about significant edits, edits like balancing unbalanced brackets, correcting a unique typo, etc. could still be saved. Thanks. --Siddhant (talk) 20:19, 4 January 2010 (UTC)

I have also had this problem often. It only happens when it has the worst possible effect - after I've worked on something for about an hour. The way I use AWB is explained here. Art LaPella (talk) 23:02, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

I've been able to avoid losing my edits by quickly copying the entire text of the page when I see that AWB is restarting. With the cursor in the edit box, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C will select the entire text and copy it. After the reload, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V will select the entire (reloaded) text and replace it with what you copied. HTH. --Auntof6 (talk) 03:10, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

I agree that AWB isn't for major edits, but even making a few minor edits takes a minute or two. And it really pisses me of when I don't make it in the 30 seconds (or whatever) and my work gets erased. Why is this reloading needed at all? Debresser (talk) 22:01, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

I agree - every now and then, in the course of performing some routine edits, I'll come across an article with a lot more problems and spend some time fixing them, and it's infuriating to see all that hard work lost because of a timeout/reload. Like Auntof6, I've got into the habit of manually saving any large article before I hit the Save button, so that I can recover my work if necessary - but it would be much better if AWB could remember my changes and reinstate them, rather than just reload the original page. Colonies Chris (talk) 23:55, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

This has had a solution for a while. After the page reloads, right click in the Edit box and select "Replace text with last edit". I don't know if others still want a completely automatic solution, but as far as I'm concerned, this can be marked as implemented, and can be archived. MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 07:02, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Belated comment: Could "Replace text with last edit" also restore the edit summary that the last edit was trying to save? -- John of Reading (talk) 17:22, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Add an option, or multiple options, to allow Typo fixing in references, indented paragraphs, etc.

Background for this request is at WT:AWB/T#AWB avoids too many areas that contain typos. Chris the speller ^yack 15:30, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Allow typing shortcuts in the Edit Summary box, similar to "Paste more" in the Edit box

I have implemented hotkey insertion (I hadn't seen this request, but it seems like a pretty obvious enhancement). In my current project I often have to type some boilerplate text. I've added a feature that lets you define text to insert using 11 fixed hotkeys (tab, and ctrl/numpad/0-9). The selections save with prefs. I have a patch file against the current version - does someone on the core team want a look at it? David Brooks (talk) 01:50, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

do not alter quotations

The prospect of automatic but improper "correction" of quotations makes me wonder whether excluding quotations from F&R should be the default, with an option to override. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:34, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

This is a greatly needed feature. Marokwitz (talk) 15:03, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Marokwitz, J. Johnson (JJ), Hmains can you please provide an example of an improper replacement AWB does? -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:15, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

When I use the search and replace feature of AWB, I *always* want to avoid replacing text inside quotations. Obviously it is very undesirable to change a quotation, and when doing massive word replacements this adds significant burden on the editor using AWB. Marokwitz (talk) 16:18, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: I think the point is that if AWB users choose to turn off the two "Ignore" checkboxes on the F&R dialog, then they have to be careful. They have to notice that they are about to edit a quote, and either skip the edit, or go and verify the source, add a {{sic}} tag, or whatever. If an AWB user wants to use F&R in the whole page except for quotes then there is no easy way to do it. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:20, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

• This becomes even more of a problem when trying to use AWB within a bot. There is work that cannot be done this way because of this quotation anomaly. Hmains (talk) 18:45, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Marokwitz, J. Johnson (JJ), Hmains is this the same request with the No changes inside single straight quotes request above? -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:49, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

• • For me, it should no altering of text within any of the several ways in which quotations can be indicated in WP text. Whether is it by means of "xxx" or by means of any kind of template such as quote, blockquote, and so on. And also within quote= in templates. Hmains (talk) 18:55, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

I can't tell if that last mentioned request amounts to a subset of this request, or is just about use of non-word characters. But it should be a general principle that that there is absolutely no automatic "correction" of any kind of quoted material. The sole and absolute criterion of correctness for any quoted material is the original material, per the original source. Even if such material is "wrong" by any other standard, when material is quoted it implies an exact copy of the source, warts and all, and the only basis for changing a quote is if it varies from the source. AWB should protect quotes from mass changes, not encourage it. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:33, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Your statement here is at variance with the guidance offered in WP:QUOTE, which says "Exceptions are trivial spelling or typographical errors that obviously do not affect the intended meaning; these may be silently corrected ...". Editors who have good sense and well-developed judgment are capable of fixing sloppy transcriptions of spoken words and careless translations of foreign-language texts even when those appear as quotations; they know not to change "PENSYLVANIA" in the inscription on the Liberty Bell, but they know that if French "merde" in a quotation is translated as "shiit" it needs to be fixed. Same thing goes for bad punctuation in an interview with a rock musician; certainly the transcriber of the interview cannot tell that the speaker omitted a hyphen or added an unneeded comma. How are Wikipedia and its readers helped by saying that "Julius Caesar put down the rebelllion" even if that extra 'l' originated hundreds of years ago? Let me remind you that AWB is used for semiautomatic spelling corrections, not automatic ones; every change should be reviewed, and skipped if if there is doubt. Chris the speller ^yack 02:17, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

I completely agree with J. Johnson (JJ): AWB should not be making any changes to quoted material. It just creates trouble. This is NOT a discussion regarding manual changes to quotes so I will not discuss that. Hmains (talk) 02:37, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

What about typographical changes such as hyphens to en dashes? Chris the speller ^yack 04:43, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Note that the suggestion is to make an option that quotations are hands-off by default with the ability to apply changes to quotations, if the user specifically selects to do so. Thus, any questions about being able to have AWB perform edits in this situation, or that situation, are specious.

My opinion is that the suggestion should be implemented (hands-off by default, with option to permit changes). I would further suggest that a popup alert be generated when quotation editing is enabled similar to the popup alert when the "Regex typo fixing" is checked.

The point is that quotations are special. They deserve handling by a human who is specifically intending to put in the extra diligence that should be applied when editing them. The reality is that AWB is used in a large number of situations where the special diligence by a human which quotations should receive is just not available, applied, or known by users that it should be applied to a particular edit.

I expect that the vast majority of edits using AWB receive somewhat cursory inspection by a human. Given the large number of edits which are performed by bots via AWB this is almost certainly true. Having the default be that changes are not made to quotations allows the best of multiple worlds: editors do not need to worry that any specific edit is in a quotation (if they are even thinking about that most of the time), bots can be run without the concern that a change which would be desireable in general text might be a bit over-aggressive for a quotation, and humans who specifically intend to be making AWB based semi-automated changes to quotations can do so.

Personally, I would find it helpful to have yet an additional option of applying changes only to quotations. That would permit dedicating a session to making only such changes which require greater diligence. Editing quotations is a different mindset than editing general text. However if the option existed to exclude editing quotations, it would be possible to approximate this by running a first pass making changes on non-quotation text, then a second pass which would be on quotations (and any edits performed by others in the interval between passes).

Having automated (find and replace, regex, typo, gen fixes, etc.) editing be excluded from quotations by default with the option to enable such changes is a good solution. -- Makyen (talk) 06:07, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

I would add 2 checkboxes: "Perform replacements in quotations", "Perform replacements in main text". This way the user could target either quotations, "Wikipedia voice" text, or both. I would also recommend this feature avoids editing the article names and publication names in references. Marokwitz (talk) 07:05, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

@Makyen: AWB's assisted typo fixing is already turned off inside quotations. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:42, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree with Mayken's suggestions to leave quoted text alone by default but allow AWB users to choose whether to go further. Chris the speller ^yack 15:41, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

@John of Reading:, the fact that this capability is already built into AWB is amazing - this would make it so much easier to implement the requested enhancement. Any of the AWB developers willing to take this challenge ? Marokwitz (talk) 06:47, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Indeed, WP:QUOTE does put a qualification on my statement re "trivial" changes. Though I am not fully confident in all Wikipedians' notions of "trivial". As Mayken said, editing quotations is (and should be!) a different mindset, requiring greater diligence, but often done with rather cursory care. I say that quotations and general text be strictly segregated in regard of any automatic and even semi-automatic editing. I doubt that that we should allow even semi-automatic editing of quotations, as I doubt that any quote is so pervasive that it any correction cannot reasonably be done manually in every instance. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:38, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Aaaand it did it again: [15] There is no reason it should ever default to mangling quotations - David Gerard (talk) 14:01, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

That was a bot edit using the general fixes, not "Find & Replace". -- John of Reading (talk) 15:44, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: Can you confirm that the general fixes did this, or does the bot run different code? -- John of Reading (talk) 15:58, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

@John of Reading: true. This was done by general fixes. So we need two things: An option to exclude general fixes inside quotes and an option to exclude F&R changes inside quotes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:12, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: I don't think it should be an option for the general fixes not to edit quotes, as the general fixes shouldn't ever be doing anything contentious. This edit looks like an ordinary bug to me. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:17, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Localization in Turkish

How is ==References== in Turkish? -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:27, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Usually "References" -> "Kaynakça". Very slight "Kaynaklar" and "Dipnotlar" Sadrettin (talk) 12:57, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

There isn't a problem is there? --Sadrettin (talk) 10:10, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

To Implement this I have to rewrite a medium size of code because the function is enwiki only. We have two cases: If the references section already exists and if it doesn't. So I think the best would be that I make a custom module for you, you test it and you tell me if there are any more changes to be made. I could also provide some examples. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:38, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

We would need ==Kaynaklar== and {{kaynakça}}, but {{reflist}} also works (redirected to {{kaynakça}}. We'd love to have the custom module if it's not easy to implement directly into AWB.--Khutuck (talk) 15:10, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

While you are at it, can you implement this for Arabic (ar) also? Arabic {{Reflist}} is ar:????:??? ???????, ==References== is ==?????== (also ==???????==, ==?????== and ==???????==). --Meno25 (talk) 13:11, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Note: AddMissingReflist in Parsers.cs must be altered. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:13, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Fix some links with no target

Auto remove AFC comment text

I second this request. I do see this alot. I also see the text repeated two or three times in an article. Bgwhite (talk) 21:56, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

What template does this text come from so we can monitor the template for changes to the wording (or consider loading the text wording via API)? Rjwilmsi 18:47, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

This comment is from Template:AFC submission/Substdraft. Other common AFC-related comments come from Template:AfC preload, Template:Afc preload/draft and Template:Article wizard/skeleton. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:38, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Actually I'd !vote for a separate page where a list of unwanted comments can be maintained. Then when someone comes along later to ask for the automatic removal of some other comment, it can be done without modifying the software again. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:43, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Changes to See also logic for Simple English Wikipedia

An example of what we do and it is wrong? -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:03, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

No problem. If you run it on the following articles you get the described affect:

1. simple:Grand Korean Waterway - AWB changes See Also to See also. It should be to "Related pages" instead.

I will add more as I find them in the next few minutes. Kumioko (talk) 01:15, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

"a" before initial vowel in double square brackets

I think this is typo fixing and we have a special page for this. -- Magioladitis (talk) 01:46, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. Just had a look. If we're on the same page it's all RegX. Not something I've got round to learning yet so someone else will have to code this. -Arb. (talk) 03:37, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

Since AWB prevents typo fixing within wikilinks, I'm not sure that the existing logic would allow us to write a rule that would do this. May want to ask at Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Typos and provide an example article. GoingBatty (talk) 04:00, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

I've fixed 6,700 of these this month using a database scan and custom find+replace rules. I agree that it would be nice if the standard typo-fixer could do this fix, but I can see that it would be hard to slot into the existing scheme. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:35, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Is this done by typo fixing now? Should I archive it? -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:28, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

No it's not, since AWB ignores wikilinks when fixing typos. GoingBatty (talk) 01:47, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Append/Prepend text before General Fixes

I don't want the current Append/Prepend text after General Fixes feature to be replaced. I want another option to be allowed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:14, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Right now I use the custom module to ArticleText = "Foo" + ArticleText to prepend text before general fixes. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:45, 30 May 2014 (UTC)

AllPages excluding redirects

We already provide "What links here (no redirects)". Is that that you want? -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:12, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

It's similar, but not really. I'm using it to scan pages for common errors, lets say spelling mistakes for the sake of argument. There's no way I can check every page for spelling mistakes just by using what links here for random pages without missing a fair few. Also, my apologies for the late reply 89.168.137.160 (talk) 16:29, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

What if you generated the list of all articles (including redirects), and then added conditions to skip articles with no changes and/or articles that contain "#REDIRECT"? Hope this helps! GoingBatty (talk) 18:41, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

I would like to join the request. I have often been using AWB to scan for common errors on all pages too. Our project has around 1000 pages without redirects and around 2500 pages with redirects. Checking 1 page takes around 1 second, so when I use the method of the skipping all the pages containing the "#REDIRECT" text, it takes another 25 minutes to "check & skip" all the 1500 redirects without purpose. -- Spike144 (talk) 12:45, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Typo fixing of specific template parameters

But, there is a chance that these fields contain in-universe words too of course. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:09, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

That's true of all article text. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:16, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Extend FixNonBreakingSpaces to also fix "pp"

• I would think this would also add the period? Technical 13 (talk) 16:55, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
• I was wondering about why "p/pp" would be done without a period, and what else that might imply. Looking at the example provided (Negombo Tamil dialect) I see that there are two under-done references; fixing the periods alone seems lame. It seems to me that in some cases it might be better to leave a mess alone rather than smoothing over a few esoteric details. If AWB is esoteric enough to find munged page numbers, but not enough for other problems that may exist, perhaps these findable problems ought to be flagged but not fixed, to indicate a more comprehensive review is needed. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 02:08, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

When removing empty gallery tags, also remove Gallery section header

Any chance that someone disagrees with this one? -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:53, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Sounds sane. Make sure the heading is not removed if the section is not empty, e.g. if it containes something else after the empty gallery. --TMg 12:26, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

TOC tab (Edit box navigation aid)..?

Remember size and position of "Find & Replace" window

See #Remember "Find & Replace" (and other) window details above. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:29, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Add "edit filter logs" to the sources

Provide a count of items in the output logs ("Successfully saved:" and Skipped:")

Hi Chris! Here's the workaround I would use:

• Make the list and process each article in the list
• If an article doesn't have a typo (e.g. it's valid text in a quote), click the Skip button to remove the article from the list
• If the article has a typo, leave it unprocessed in my list and start the next article.
• After looking at each article in the list, you should be left with those with a typo.
• If there are enough articles, create the typo rule, refresh the typo list, and process the list to test the new rule.
• If there aren't enough articles to create the typo rule, reprocess the list and fix the articles manually.

Hope this helps! GoingBatty (talk) 01:40, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

Process protected pages

• I support this request but would go a little further to say that it should open a browser tab to a new section of the talk page of the protected page and prefill in an edit request (it should be able to give a detailed description of changes to be made) so that the AWB user only needs to review the edit request and submit it. AWB should once opening this tab, continue on its task to complete (which would leave the tab in the browser unaffected). As I think about implementation for this, I'm thinking it might be best served as an add-on module. :) Technical 13 (talk) 16:49, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Making a list from "Links on page" should not alphabetize the links

The links should be shown in the sequence they (first) show up on the page. They should only be sorted if "keep list alphabetized" is set. Now there's nothing but save the wiki page source text in a text file and import this as UTF8 file to circumvent this irritating behaviour. --FA2010 (talk) 14:26, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

I don't think we can do this for you. We use the API to get links on pages since links may come from templates on a page and not just plain wikilinks. The API sorts the returned links, for example, links on page A are these from the API. So we could only provide links in the order on the page if we stopped showing links from within templates etc. Rjwilmsi 16:30, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Regex search in "Substitute templates"

Hide the new edit summary box

Add minimize/Maximize functionality to Normal Find and replace box

Add minimize/Maximize functionality to Advanced Find and replace box

Compare differences in Make Module function

Db-templates = skip-option

My workaround is to populate the Skip Text Contains field with {{(Af[Dd]|Prod blp/dated|db-|speedy deletion-significance|Proposed deletion|Article for deletion). GoingBatty (talk) 03:59, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

I tried to copy that text but it didn't skip the {{db-band}} or {{db-person}}. -(t) Josve05a (c) 20:17, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I forgot to press "Regex". -(t) Josve05a (c) 20:26, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

(Sorry) But can some1 help me to include the {{PBB}}-tamplate to that regex. It would help me SOO much! -(t) Josve05a (c) 20:29, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Try {{(Af[Dd]|Prod blp/dated|db-|speedy deletion-significance|Proposed deletion|Article for deletion)|PBB Bgwhite (talk) 20:46, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. So I just have to add [...] | [whatever I want] -(t) Josve05a (c) 21:01, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, assuming "whatever I want" is the name of a template. Bgwhite (talk) 21:09, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

I would put the right parenthesis at the end, as follows:

{{(Af[Dd]|Prod blp/dated|db-|speedy deletion-significance|Proposed deletion|Article for deletion|PBB|whatever you want)

GoingBatty (talk) 01:10, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Remove 10-digit ISBNs from cite templates when 13-digit is also present

Remove blank lines separating bulleted lists

It's true that having blank lines between bullet points is wrong and should be fixed in many cases. I was also thinking about this but came to the conclusion that it's not so easy to automate. People are using this as a feature in both numbered ...

1. Series a, item a
2. Series a, item b

1. Series b, item a
2. Series b, item b

... as well as unnumbered lists. If the user wanted the two lists to be separated AWB shouldn't merge them. Suggestion: Check for loneley list items between other list items:

* A  * B    * C    * D  * E  

In this case both empty lines should be removed. --TMg 12:08, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Fixing interwiki pipe links

Move anchor in front title in heading

notifying about skipped pages in pre-parse mode

@Kwamikagami: - One workaround would be to enable the logging feature, pre-parse the list, and then sort the log by reason to find the articles with non-Unicode characters and fix them manually. GoingBatty (talk) 16:47, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for pinging me.

I doubt many people would think of that, or would even be aware that they're missing anything. Would it be possible to have it as a feature? -- kwami (talk) 16:51, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami:, @GoingBatty: we could add this information somewhere in the Manual with the help of GoingBatty. I think the current behaviour is satisfying. Kwamikagami, you can edit the pages that remain in the list and add all the pages skipped for having Unicode control characters too. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:12, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Would it be possible to have a bot change the ones in the PUA range to &#x...; format, and tag them with {{PUA}}? And tag other things with some other marker, so we can find them? -- kwami (talk) 13:16, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: I think the best is to ask this in WP:BOTREQ. Rjwilmsi did something similar a year ago. I also would like to know how many pages are out there with this problem. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:25, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Update: We've taken care of nearly all the PUA on WP-en, but new instances do crop up from pasting refs and the like. It would still be nice IMO to have them left white rather than skipped in pre-parse mode, but is much less of a problem for now. -- kwami (talk) 02:08, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Remove day of the week from citation date parameters

Remove or tag empty sections

• Bump Werieth (talk) 15:44, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

When creating new articles with multiple sections it is often convenient to start with the section headers (in the manner of an outline), then fill them individually. It would be irksome to have them removed before one gets to filling them! Therefore automatic removal should allow a grace period for new sections, and respect any tags indicating the article or section is under construction (see following proposal). ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:47, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

It wouldnt change the default behavior, but in cases where the user is knowingly needing to remove either the contents of or the entire section across multiple articles (External links, gallery sections are examples) as part of a cleanup process the adding the templates is annoying. Werieth (talk) 20:25, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Handle HTML codes in wikilinks

Change to use {{Official website}}

Remove DEFAULTSORT if it matches the article title

...except where the article is about a person, and the DEFAULTSORT is there in first name surname format so no one adds an incorrect DEFAULTSORT surname, first name (e.g. Bao Ninh). In the meantime, you can update your F&R rules to find {{DEFAULTSORT:%%pagename%%}}\n and replace it with nothing. GoingBatty (talk) 05:09, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Do not move stubs

Or a skip if...only moving stub-template?-(t) Josve05a (c) 15:10, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Josve05a we already have a feature for "skip if only minor fixes". -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:42, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Josve05a We do not move stub in Swedish wikipedia. Do we? -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:12, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

(Checking...) (t) Josve05a (c) 17:50, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: Yes it does. Run AWB on sv:Ornis Svecica (with auto tag on). It tries to move {{Tidningsstub-Sverige}} to under the categories. (t) Josve05a (c) 18:05, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Josve05a what do stubs in swedish wikipedia have in common? Maybe our logic needs update. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:04, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: (per sv:Kategori:Alla stubbmallar which all stub templates are collected in), all stub-templates are either ending with just 'foostub' or is called 'foostub-foo'. (with some exceptions like sv:Mall:Substub which is NOT a stub-template.) (t) Josve05a (c) 13:18, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

And we also have these stub templates which does not follow this rule. (t) Josve05a (c) 15:32, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Josve05a This is our regex

And the rule is

I ve been told in the past to follow this order. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:44, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

AWB should have a feature to use it offline

Fix more CS1 errors in date fields

I also have created a module at User:BattyBot/CS1 errors-dates, which is a work in progress - feel free to incorporate any of these into the genfixes. GoingBatty (talk) 13:40, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

I find this approach to be a bit back to front. Writing lots of regexes is fine, but has the analysis been done to identify what are the most common errors. Otherwise we can spend ages writing clever regexes to find that only one page matches. Rjwilmsi 14:40, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

@Rjwilmsi: I'm not aware of any formal analysis. Any suggestions on how to get that done would be greatly appreciated. GoingBatty (talk) 16:13, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

What I would like to do/have done is get a databsae dump of all pages in the category, or get a full database dump and cross reference to those pages in the category. Then parse database dump to pull out all citation templates, all the date fields out of those. Put this in a flat file, load to MySQL, then do analysis to see how many dates are non-standard and how many have particular errors (e.g. how many start with a zero). Can then target fixes specifically at what's found. AWB genfixes likely already fix hundreds or thousands of these pages, but need to pull the hundreds/thousands out of the > 100k pages in the category. I take this approach with journal cites. Rjwilmsi 17:04, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

More features in the replace expression

There is a workaround using some of the MediaWiki builtin functions. Something like {{subst:lc:$1}} should convert $1 to lowercase, for example. But this won't work well if you have ticked "Add replacements to edit summary", since "subst" doesn't work in edit summaries. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:11, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

@Svensson1: \n can be used in both find and replace. Could you please provide more information on how you're trying to use it? GoingBatty (talk) 18:38, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

I just want the possibility to do a replace like this: "$1\n$2". But it is not extremly important for me and you say that it already works (at least outside the Regex tester), so maybe nothing needs to be done concerning \n. The two other I mentioned, \u and \x, is not so important for me for the moment. Svensson1 (talk) 14:24, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

@John of Reading: Substituting also doesn't work within <ref>...</ref> tags, so doing something lik changing months from "november" to "November" and "january" to "January" each have to be spelled out in different regex replacements. GoingBatty (talk) 14:19, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

I suspect there was confusion about \n because it does not work for replacements in the Regex Tester - it displays the text "\n" rather than the desired effect of a new line. It would be great if there was a way to get it to work there. MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 20:43, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

@Mandarax: - If I remember correctly, you need to check one of the boxes in the Regex tester to get it to work, but don't need to check the corresponding box in the Find and replace screen to get it to work there. I'll look in to that further later. GoingBatty (talk) 14:16, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

As far as I know, there's nothing a user can do to make this work correctly in the Tester. When I first encountered this problem long, long ago, I assumed that the Tester was a tool which accurately mirrored what happens with the actual Find and replace, but I eventually discovered that that is not the case for \n. MANdARAX o XA?Ab?AM 04:30, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

I reviewed the archived bug reports, and don't see the exact issue being discussed here, so I've opened a new bug report. GoingBatty (talk) 15:18, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Also, substituting within <ref>...</ref> seems possible if you combine parser functions (e.g. {{subst:lc:$1}} inside {{subst:#tag|ref}}) - I look forward to playing around with this. GoingBatty (talk) 15:18, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

See User talk:Technical 13#Substituting templates inside references for more details on the workaround for this if interested. Technical 13 (talk) 00:11, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

AKA

This request appears to be in line with WP:ABBR#Miscellanea. GoingBatty (talk) 15:33, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Merge other uses template

GoingBatty I would be interested. What are the rules? -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:33, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: - Here's a start on the logic, but it's too greedy (i.e. if {{for}} has more than three parameters, such as Systematics:

Thanks for your consideration! GoingBatty (talk) 04:03, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Resolve "Link to disambiguate" when it's a #REDIRECT

I second this, as it is a badly needed feature for disambiguators. For example, Saint Thomas is a disambiguation page, but many of the incoming links will be to redirects like St. Thomas, St Thomas, St. Thomas College, and St. Thomas' College. When using the disambig feature of AWB, these redirect links are ignored in articles, when they should be treated just like other disambiguation links. bd2412 T 18:12, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

@KorneySan and BD2412: You may want to try WP:WPCleaner instead, which will do this for you. Good luck! GoingBatty (talk) 18:38, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Suppose we just make it so that WPCleaner can be run through AWB? bd2412 T 19:21, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Even if it was technically possible, their approaches to making changes are very different. For example, WPCleaner allows you to fix multiple ambiguous links in an article before clicking save. On the other hand, AWB will automatically make many changes for you, whereas WPCleaner will suggest some but make you manually do each one. GoingBatty (talk) 19:50, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

AWB's disambig feature suggests possible alternative fixes for a disambiguation page, but it can only be loaded with links to one disambiguation page at a time (and, as noted above, ignores redirects to that disambiguation page). It would be great if AWB could recognize those redirects and treat them the same as the disambiguation title to which they redirect, and if AWB would let you load links to multiple disambiguation pages at a time. For example, it is not uncommon for articles to be written that include multiple disambiguation links to nationality/language terms (e.g. "she speaks English and French"; or "the region was colonized by the English and the French"). Should any of this be technically challenging to implement? bd2412 T 20:00, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Let's see an example. I have a disambiguation page (let's name it "thing") with disambiguation links "thing1", "thing2", "thing3". Then I take a "what's links to" to "thing" pages list and get disambig links from "thing". Works great on start. But then I found a redirect page "thingy" that points straight to "thing" (#REDIRECT [[thing]]). So I take a "what's links to" to "thingy" pages list and... ups, pages doesn't contain word "thing", they contain "thingy", so disamig doesn't work and nothing changed. Ok, I put "thingy" to disambig link and get disambig links. Ups again, there is only one page - "thing". For now I need process pages twice: first to replace "thingy" with "thing", secong to disambig "thing" to correct page. I think it can be simplified. KorneySan (talk) 17:07, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

The example should be, if the disambiguation page is "thing", with redirects "thingy" and "thing (song)" and "thing (film)", that AWB should treat the disambiguation title and all of its redirects the same, so that it provides a solution irrespective of whether the link is the page title or a redirect to it. Run once, solve anywhere. This is particularly important for pages like Destiny (disambiguation), for which links to the actual title do not need to be fixed at all but for which links to redirects Destiny (comics), Destiny (album), Destiny (film), and Destiny (song) need to be fixed. bd2412 T 20:03, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

dates

@Wikiuser13: Have you tried the AWB custom modules posted at User:Ohconfucius#AWB tools? GoingBatty (talk) 05:17, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

• Oh, it would be nice if such could be systematised and automated one step further, though. ;-) -- Ohc ^¡digame! 06:01, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: I tired it after you suggested. Couldn't it be built in? And a problem is that it convert all dates to dmy or mdy without seeing {{use dmy dates}} or {{use mdy dates}}. If you are editing a page with {{use mdy dates}} and using module to convert dates to dmy, it will convert all mdy dates to dmy.--Wikiuser13 (talk) 08:06, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

@Wikiuser13: You're right, so if you're using the dmy module, you should probably skip pages that don't already have {{use dmy dates}}. As documented in Template:Use dmy dates#Usage, some people use this template to indicate that ALL dates should be in dmy format, while others think that dates in references can be in a different format than the body of the article. Since Ohconfucius' modules/scripts change ALL dates, if this were added to AWB's general fixes, I imagine that people in the latter camp would be upset at the bot owners who are running general fixes that changed their formatting en masse. GoingBatty (talk) 13:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Doesn't count admin actions in counts

Archiveurl

A list of articles with this is located at User:Josve05a/sandbox3 and was created on 9 January 2014, thanks to Bgwhite. (t) Josve05a (c) 18:16, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

The code that CHECKLINKS is using for this is available here (search for ## HACK) (t) Josve05a (c) 01:29, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

InternetArchive have now started using wayback.archive.org instead of web.archive.org, so that shold be included as well.(t) Josve05a (c) 01:32, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

In the find statement, I suggest looking for both "http" and "https". In the replace statement, I suggest adding |archiveurl=//web.archive.org... to create a protocol-relative link. GoingBatty (talk) 03:41, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

archive.org certainly hasn't changed over to wayback.archive.org completely. Links to their site from archive pages still go to web.archive.org. In addition, I made a data request to them for the URL to an archive page. The response indicated an archive address in the web.archive.org domain. In a brief look, I found no mention of a change to wayback.archive.org on their site. When I went to wayback.archive.org I was redirected to archive.org. It appears that archives are available at wayback.archive.org URLs, but is is not instead of web.archive.org.

web.archive.org still appears to be their primary choice.

I agree with using protocol relative links, per VPP. However, that discussion was closed without an implementation plan. Makyen (talk) 03:57, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Josve05a, I also agree with GoingBatty and Makyen in using protocol relative links, per VPP. The decision there was:

"Use HTTPS links for HTTPS only sites, protocol relative links for sites that support both HTTP and HTTPS, and HTTP links for sites that don't support HTTPS at all"

That effectively means that this proposal would be changed to:

Make AWB change the following:

{{cite web|url=http://web.archive.org/web/YYYYMMDDTTTTTT/http://example.com/|title=Example title}} or

{{cite web|url=https://web.archive.org/web/YYYYMMDDTTTTTT/http://example.com/|title=Example title}} to

{{cite web|url=http://example.com/|archiveurl=//web.archive.org/web/YYYYMMDDTTTTTT/http://example.com/|archivedate=YYYY-MM-DD|title=Example title}}
(Y=Year e.g. 2010, M=Month e.g. 12 (December), D=Day e.g. 10, T=Time e.g. 112345 (11:23:45).

Since AWB can't possibly know if the http://example.com site supports protocol relative links, the http//: for the |url= parameter should remain unchanged for now; however, if this is to be added, there's no reason not to add the same fix for citations that already include both the |url= and |archiveurl= parameters; that would add the following to the find statement of the proposal:

{{cite web|url=http://example.com/|archiveurl=http://web.archive.org/web/YYYYMMDDTTTTTT/http://example.com/|title=Example title}} or

{{cite web|url=http://example.com/|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/YYYYMMDDTTTTTT/http://example.com/|title=Example title}} or

This could be the start of the implementation plan the decision reached at the Village Pump lacked. If successful, it could be duplicated for other websites known to support protocol relative links. Additional steps would be to create the same tasks for the other {{cite ...| formats and modify the citation tools to exclude http//: or https//: in the |archiveurl= parameter to avoid the problem to start with.--D'Ranged 1 ^talk 12:32, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

A discussion about implementation was held at: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 123#How should external protocol-relative links be implemented.3F

Progress was made, and very rough steps for implementation were enumerated, including having AWB make changes. The stated objections were resolved/withdrawn. Uniform resource locator#Protocol-relative URLs was written and a redirect created at Protocol-relative link for linking in edit summaries when such changes were made. -- Makyen (talk) 18:55, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Josve05a, GoingBatty what is the status of this one? -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:17, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

@Magioladitis: I'm sorry, I don't have any more information on this topic. GoingBatty (talk) 22:55, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

Ability to switch to template doc pages for categorization

Wildcard

If you have built a list of articles and want to search for [[*|turnip]] within them, then the existing "Find & Replace" will find them for you. A regular expression such as \[\[[^\|\]\[]+\|\s*turnip\s*\]\] will find two open square brackets, then arbitrary text that doesn't include any pipes or square brackets, then a pipe, then the word "turnip", and then two close square brackets.

If you asking about using this kind of search to create the list of articles, then this is already available, just about. You can search with arbitrary regular expressions if you download a copy of Wikipedia and then use AWB's database scanner. But that's a big download. I'd be happy to do searches like this for you, but my current download is two months old. If you watchlist User:John of Reading/Latest download you'll get a notification when I have the February database. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:41, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

This page has character(s) in the Unicode Private Use Area so unfortunately can't be edited with AWB. The page will now be skipped

Technical 13, this doesn't answer your question, but.... I often delete the Unicode Private Use (PUA) if I don't see a reason for it. kwami has started deleting the PUAs or adding {{PUA}}. Template docs show which articles use the template and how kwami finds articles with a PUA. Any article with a PUA would have it added in the past month. Bgwhite (talk) 21:50, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Interesting. Well, alternatively or concurrently with my request above, if AWB could tag those pages with a new section at the bottom of the page with that template, they would be easier to find, no? Unfortunately, I'm not an admin (not sure I want it although I've played with the idea in my head to be more useful in technical areas), so I can't delete and currently, AWB offers me no way to go back and find which pages those were without running the queue over again from scratch, which takes forever when you have ##,### articles to go through... Technical 13 (talk) 22:01, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Don't they show up in the log? That's how I find them. -- kwami (talk) 22:04, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

• I don't have logging enabled. Last time I had it enabled, I couldn't find anything in it anyways because it was too cluttered and there isn't a good filtering option. Technical 13 (talk) 22:45, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

@Technical 13: I find it helpful to click on the Skip Reason column header to sort the results by skip reason - this might work for you too. GoingBatty (talk) 17:39, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

AWB can not edit these pages because unintentional things happen when saved by AWB. For instance, characters may change and text may be altered in a way we do not control. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:52, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

• Mag, I'm not suggesting it should edit the page, I'm suggesting it should append a category to the bottom in a new nameless section (so it doesn't touch the existing code at all) using &action=edit&section=new and for these pages to be logged in my false positives text file so I can go back and fix them after. Technical 13 (talk) 23:17, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

I think it should be explored to see if editing/submitting the page in safemode would enable AWB to edit these pages (perhaps just to ID and/or remove the PUA characters). Safemode is automatically entered if the requesting browser is identified as being on the blacklist. The blacklist is a list of browsers known to not properly handle unicode characters. When in safemode all "the non-ascii characters in the initial content of the textarea are converted into the form &#xxxx; and the value safemode=1 is hidden in the form".

In a brief look, I did not see a direct way to request for the data to be delivered with the conversions to &#xxxx; already done. However, if AWB is unable to perform such conversions itself and submit the data using safemode, AWB could spoof the browser ID to have the data sent pre-converted. However, doing this would be a much larger/different RFE than just logging the event. It is also possible that this method of handling PUA characters has already been investigated and found to not be viable. Makyen (talk) 19:46, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Make Arabic Wikipedia list of typos usable on other Arabic Wikimedia projects

Option to turn off re-ordering of references

The option would be to uncheck the Apply general fixes box and run a custom module, such as Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Custom Modules#Customised "General Fixes". GoingBatty (talk) 04:07, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Modification to the append/prepend function

See Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Order of procedures, which does not take into account the Sort meta data after option. Could you please confirm that using the Sort meta data after option does not meet your needs? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 03:34, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the quick response. Because I am editing at Wikia the majority of the general fixes don't apply and most of my logic is built into either modules or the Find and Replace functions. It does not appear that checking the sort meta data after has any effect on either of those things. I have figured out how to prepend things by coding it into a module but I have not yet been able to do so with the append stuff. Do you happen to know if there is an example of how this can be done? Reguyla (talk) 03:43, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

@Reguyla: I found Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Custom Modules#Inserting text just before categories, which you might be able to adapt to your needs. GoingBatty (talk) 04:05, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, your right that will work for somethings, but it still seems like its a lot harder than it needs to be. I'm fairly technical so I will figure it out but not everyone can or should be required too IMO. Thanks for the help though. Reguyla (talk) 04:35, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Move Special characters templates below infobox

Experimental typos

Beep sound when done

@Blackfish: So you mean beep on completion of pre-parse mode? Rjwilmsi 11:29, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Actually, I was thinking about any edit, which takes a few minutes or even sometimes hours. Blackfish (talk) 13:57, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

single button settings load

Fix disambiguation links where the link is a parameter in a "disambiguation needed" template.

wikia metadata

alternative port number support

Convert to use {{lang}}

Alert when adding a red link

It would definitely be a good idea - and this should also include transclusions of red-linked templates. Of course, the extra work involved with detecting these (including geting data from the wiki) would make it undesireable for anyone who doesn't actually want it. ??? ????? Od Mishehu 13:02, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, definitely optional, but I'd hope it can be limited to noting where text has been changed within [[<here>|...]] and, given your suggestion, {{<here>|...}} and only rechecking those links. However, it may be rather simpler to just render the page and look for new red links. Mark Hurd (talk) 09:33, 27 November 2014 (UTC)

AWB Request from Wikisource.- Regex block move.

Wikisource support feature: Page: block-shift

Generate a list of user pages/user talk pages based on editors who have commented on a particular page (or better yet, particular section of a page)

This would be very useful for notifying people of RFCs, ANIs, AFDs, or the resolution of those processes. Gaijin42 (talk) 16:45, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Links on page (talk page), then filter for user pages -- this doesn't work? Stevie is the man! ^{Talk o Work} 17:28, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

To do this for a section, you could copy the section into a sandbox and ask AWB to list the links in the sandbox. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:31, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

To be more precise: get the list of links; change to talk pages (some users have links to both their user page and their talk page, while others only have one); and remove duplicates. ??? ????? Od Mishehu 11:48, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Confirmation for Stop

This is a good idea for when an editor has made additional edits on top of the automated ones. Otherwise, 'Stop' isn't really a problem as the article can be submitted again. This idea could be applied to 'Skip' as well. Stevie is the man! ^{Talk o Work} 12:58, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Yes, my thought. I wouldn't want to interrupt the workflow in cases where the user wants an immediate stop. Is there a simple test the code can make for the editor having made manual edits? David Brooks (talk) 17:08, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

The simplest one would be: create a boolean (bool) flag. When loading a page, set it to false; as soon as the user makes any manual change, set it to true. ??? ????? Od Mishehu 07:25, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Warning on closing the program should be improved

??? ????? In the options menu we provide a "warn on exit" option. You can select it or not. Is this what you are looking for? -- Magioladitis (talk) 10:40, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

No. If I have that set, then it will remind me even if I had just saved the settings; and if I hadn't, I need to closew that window, save the settings, and then give the exit command again. ??? ????? Od Mishehu 11:46, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

AutoWikiBrowser server client

Have a settings find-and-replace feature

Option to increase number of articles loaded from Random pages

Very expensive query. Already requested, discussed and declined. -- Magioladitis (talk) 11:09, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Can you give me a link to the discussion? I'm unable to find it by the search function. ... discospinster _talk 13:11, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

Update

I'd like to request a programming update the next time a new version is released. My apologies if this is something that's already been dealt with, but I thought I should raise it just in case.

What I'm finding is that when I do disambiguation runs, I'm running into an increasing number of links where the pipetext has been set off from the dablink by means of {{!}} instead of the conventional | . But the result of that ends up being that AWB doesn't recognize it as a link to be disambiguated -- so instead of being able to fix it within AWB, I end up having to manually edit that link.

So is it possible to update AWB to recognize {{!}} as equivalent to pipe in a dab run? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 23:50, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Change BLP unsourced to BLP sources if article has existing references

Remove empty sub and sup tags

Expand FixLivingThingsRelatedDates to fix "born in" and "died in"

Regular expressions to trigger an "Are you sure?" message on saving

A "Save and stop" button

CNR list building

Beep sound when done skipping and ready to review an edit with AWB in focus

%%key%% without removing accents

Request

User:AryanSogd This has no use now in Wikipedia since all info is kept in Wikidata. Do you need these for Wikia? -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:47, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Keyboard shortcut at least for the "Internal link" button, and maybe "Bold text", "Italic text", and "External link" buttons

Make user-defined rules able to handle nested templates

Remember "AWB Regex Tester" window size for session, just like "Replace Special"

Let Ctrl+A work in the "AWB Regex Tester" window's "Result:" textbox

Fix incorrect piped wikilinks

Add a "skip if page </> x bytes" option, where x is user-defined

Tom.Reding try: Skip if contains .{1,x} with Regex on. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:42, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

Nice! I like it.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ?contribs ?dgaf)  15:32, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

There seems to be a limit at "Skip if Contains: .{935,}". This 17 kB page is skipped only if ".{935,}" and lower, but not ".{936,}" and higher. ".{936,100000}" doesn't skip either. Is this an AWB problem or a regex engine one?

I haven't looked through bug reports yet, but will post ^Done there if I can't fine one.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ?contribs ?dgaf)  20:21, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I think the "skip" regex is being run against each paragraph separately, not the whole article. The longest paragraphs in that article have 935-ish characters. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:32, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Nope, [.\s]{936,} doesn't skip either.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ?contribs ?dgaf)  20:42, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

authorlink addition

Fix ref tags missing name

rev 10869 Rjwilmsi 11:06, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

@Rjwilmsi: Thanks for making this change. Where should it be documented in WP:AWB/GF? I added it to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/History#Current 5.5 series. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 01:09, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Persistent crosswiki login for WMF wikis, and interwiki links

I came to request essentially the same thing, though in my case it's that all Wikia sites share the same accounts.JoshuaJSlone (talk) 16:51, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

Remove |format= from {{Infobox television}}

Don't erase 'Edit box' text after being disconnected!

@Tom.Reding: Are you aware of the "Replace text with last edit" option at the bottom of the right-click menu in the text box? I think that's supposed to handle this case; after the re-start, you should be able to select this and have a second attempt at saving your changes. -- John of Reading (talk) 05:22, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

@John of Reading: No I was not; I'll give it a shot next time (or force it) and see if it solves this problem. Thanks!   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ?contribs ?dgaf)  12:31, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

@John of Reading: Thanks, that works. I updated the status to exists.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ?contribs ?dgaf)  15:57, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Add a "Repeat until no changes made" checkbox next to "Apply No. of times"

Make a "Skip list" tab that skips pages on the main list that are also on the "Skip list".

Display page processing time in the statistics bar

Move ==See also== above ==Notes==, automatically

Add the full {{Disambiguation needed}} template when tagging a link

Jamesmcmahon0 I replaced {{dn}} with {{Disambiguation needed}}. Still not adding date parameter. It should be doable by just refreshing the page after adding the tag. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:07, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

There is a problem that if you reparse the page, AWB finds the Disambig link again and brings up the disambig dialogue box. Could the AWB logic be changed so that the disambiguation is done before general fixes etc. are applied? Jamesmcmahon0 (talk) 15:31, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

Add keyboard shortcut Alt+f to toggle between "If" and "Find" tabs in the "Replace Special" window

Create a utility which highlights all regex rules that operate on a particular input string

Remove stub templates from redirect pages

Make the edit summary dropdown wider

Smarter Find & Replace skip with respect to minor replacements

Make the Regex Tester's Find editbox vertical-scrollable

Source of article : Wikipedia