Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MalnadachBot 14

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard. The result of the discussion was

Approved.

MalnadachBot 14[edit]

Operator: ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 11:54, Sunday, February 5, 2023 (UTC)

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: automatic

Programming language(s): AutoWikiBrowser

Source code available: AWB, regex given below

Function overview: Remove {{Possibly empty category}} from pages that transclude {{tracking category}}

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): One time run

Estimated number of pages affected: 1,600

Namespace: Category

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

Already has a bot flag (Yes/No): Yes

Function details: {{Tracking category}} has {{Possibly empty category}} embedded in it. There are 1,600 category pages which transclude both {{tracking category}} and {{possibly empty category}}, leading them to display {{possibly empty category}} twice, such as Special:PermanentLink/1096311156. This task is to remove {{possibly empty category}} from all pages in Category namespace which transclude both templates (and their redirects).

The regex pattern to find is \{\{( *pec *|[^e}{]*?empty *cat[^}]*?)\}\} ?\n?. This is replaced with nothing, which removes the template and a blank space or next line character following it, if there is one.

Discussion[edit]

I just realised {{empty category}} was added to {{tracking category}} 12 days ago by Bearcat. I had misinterpreted the year timestamp earlier as 2022. However given that a lot of tracking categories are often empty, I do not think the addition by Bearcat is controversial and this can proceed. If removal is not appropriate for a bot given the recentness of addition, feel free to close this as withdrawn. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 12:18, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
At the very least I'd like to know the rationale behind the change; I too noticed it last week and was rather surprised that there was no clear indication of why or what purpose it served. Primefac (talk) 13:14, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that a lot of autogenerated tracking categories (e.g. "Single chart usages for...", "Free content from..." "Articles containing X-language text", etc.) show up at Special:WantedCategories every time it runs a new batch — but having been working with it more regularly of late than I did in the past, I've been coming across a lot of situations where I would create the tracking category, then a few days later it would get emptied out for one reason or another and I'd get a notification that it was up for deletion as an empty category. I'd think nothing of it, until it started looping back into cycles where a category I had previously created, which then got emptied out and deleted, would then return to WantedCategories again on a future run because it had been repopulated by further edits to the same page or similar edits on a different page.
Since it's silly and pointless to have maintenance categories trapped in a create-delete-recreate-redelete cycle, tracking categories should obviously just be kept even if they're empty — but this shouldn't be conditional on whether the creator of the tracking category (be it me or somebody else) remembered to add the "empty category" template alongside the "tracking category" template or not — since the batch here doesn't pertain to every single tracking category that exists, it's clear that not all tracking categories were ever tagged for both "tracking category" and "empty category", and that's also demonstrated by the fact that the sibling categories that I had examined in order to figure out how to create the missing tracking categories in the first place also hadn't been tagged for "empty category" (because I would have copied that if they had been.)
So, really, every tracking category should just be automatically marked as a category that might be empty sometimes but should not be deleted on that basis, regardless of whether any individual tracking category's creator remembered to flag it that way or not, so the choices were either "go through every tracking category in Wikipedia manually adding the empty category template if it isn't already present" or "just make the tracking category template automatically contain an empty-category notice". Bearcat (talk) 16:42, 5 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Primefac (talk) 17:59, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Trial complete. 50 edits. One minor issue I had was when a blank space followed {{Possibly empty category}} instead of new line, the bot didn't remove it as in Special:Diff/1138140577. This has been resolved in further edits with updated regex Special:Diff/1138140830. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 06:54, 8 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Approved. Primefac (talk) 11:31, 27 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard.