Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WikiCleanerBot 23

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.

WikiCleanerBot 23

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

Time filed: 11:27, Wednesday, November 4, 2020 (UTC)

Function overview: Remove references used several times in the same place (like text<ref name="r1"/><ref name="r1"/>).

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): Java (WPCleaner)

Source code available: On GitHub (especially algorithm 558)

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): Twice a month

Estimated number of pages affected: A dump analysis returned 6850 pages in Wikipedia:CHECKWIKI/WPC 558 dump. So a few thousands for the initial run, and probably only a few dozen/hundreds afterwards for each run.

Namespace(s): Mainspace

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

Function details: My bot can already detect when the same reference is used twice at the same place in an article. With this task, it will be able to fix this duplication by removing one of the reference in the group of references, like in this edit on Ernest Lyon.

I've just run the same fix on frWP, it resulted in about 500 edits (with "Référence dupliquée" as part of the comment). After some improvements for named references, a second run fixed about 850 articles, leaving 36 articles to be fixed manually (which I did afterwards).

Discussion

What is the actual purpose of this bot? It doesn't actually seem to really offer all that much, except to remove duplicate references. Duplicate references aren't that much of a problem. I don't see a purpose in this, especially because of the very high volume. BJackJS talk 17:52, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

The purpose is what I already stated in my request, why do you want another purpose? Duplicated references are useless, they clutter the display, and for the reader they may only bring confusion. As with the other tasks of my bot, such edits will be combined with other fixes when possible. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 19:12, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

For example, fix on 10 Minute School would remove 2 useless references from the References section, out of the existing 15 references, leaving 13 references. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:23, 4 November 2020 (UTC)

Approved for trial (30 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. One the one hand, I understand the concerns of BJackJS, but from an AFC/new page perspective (which I'm involved with) the existence of multiple duplicate references creates a lot of unnecessary clutter and makes it harder to check the references. I think this is at least worth putting through trial. Primefac (talk) 15:31, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Primefac. I fail to understand your concerns and the ones of BJackJS about this task. Did you notice that I was talking about the same reference used at the same place in the text (not at different places), which is obviously a mistake from the editor (either an unwanted copy/paste, or the wrong reference name for one of them). If it's the number of edits that is a problem, I can always go through the list in several days (a few hundreds a day is easy to do).

Trial complete. I've done the 30 edits, I've seen no problems on them. Most of the edits are simple edits (duplicated named reference in the text), a few are more complex (duplicated named reference in {{reflist}}: (391211) 2006 HZ51, (528381) 2008 ST291, ... ; duplicated unnamed reference in text: 12th Planet (musician), 13th Signal Regiment (United Kingdom), ...) --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 12:52, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

 Approved. Primefac (talk) 20:32, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

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.