Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MelonBot 9

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

MelonBot

• (BRFA
• Approved BRFAs
• talk
• contribs
• count
• SUL
• logs
• page moves
• block log
• rights log
• flag)

Operator: Happy‑melon

Automatic or Manually Assisted: 'Triggered' automatic

Programming Language(s): Pywiki

Function Summary: 1-click TfD closures

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

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

Function Details: Here's a nice little can of worms :D - A 1-click TfD closure script. I review a TfD, and make a decision as to keep/delete/relist/no-consensus. Give that result to the script, and it does all the boring parts. For keep and no-consensus, it closes the TfD (I added a hack to pywiki so it makes that edit under my sysop account, for transparency), removes the {{TfD}} notice from the template(s) involved, adds {{tfdend}} to the talkpages (a step I usually forget!) and removes the subpage from Wikipedia:Templates for deletion if it is the last open discussion on the page. For deletes, it clears all instances of the template(s), then deletes them from my account (and their talkpages), and closes the TfD (again as me). Relists are just a matter of moving the discussion to today's subpage and adding {{relist}}. I emphasise that there is no possibility of the script closing TfDs by itself. It's just a helper script to do all the hard work. Happy‑melon 20:53, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Discussion

What do you mean by "clears all instances"? --Carnildo (talk) 00:21, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

It edits all pages that transclude the template, to remove that template call. Obviously if the outcome is to replace a template with another, then that will require manual intervention, or a separate script. I thought about taking input for a replacement regex, but decided it was too risky loading untested regexes each time a replace was called for. I have loads of more advanced template-replacement code lying around anyway. Essentially the script only deals with the four most common outcomes from a TfD - there are ideas like 'redirect', 'replace', 'deprecate', etc, none of which are covered, but they're uncommon enough to be unnecessary to handle. It's just a convenience script. Happy‑melon 09:37, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

So long as you're manually approving each change, and then able to immediately review them, then I don't see a problem. Anybody else have an opinion? – Quadell ^(talk) 17:48, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Well I couldn't in all honesty say I was "manually approving each change" or "immediately review[ing]" them. It's basically a fire-and-forget weapon: I set it off on one TfD, and it does the work while I'm looking at the next one. So all the actions it performs, although uncontroversial (since all the flack falls on me for making the call at the TfD), need to be given the same level of technical approval as a fully-automated bot, because I'm not oversighting it while it's working, just telling it what TfDs to do what to. Happy‑melon 19:28, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

 Approved. But please check the changes from time to time, to make sure there are no unexpected problems (e.g. someone modified {{TfD}}, or a talk page was unusually formatted.) As you know, if your script mistakenly removes all instances of a template from hundreds of pages, you'll be stuck with the clean-up. – Quadell ^(talk) 13:38, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

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