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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Quadell (talk | contribs) at 12:52, 5 June 2009 ({{BotTrial|edits=150}}). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Erik9bot 9

Operator: Erik9 (talk)

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Manually started, performs edits automatically.

Programming Language(s): Uses AWB with autosave function

Function Overview: As an expansion of task 6, adds template:unreferenced to all articles identified as unsourced and not already tagged to that effect, using substantially the same algorithm.

Edit period(s): continuous, as needed

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

This task would add template:unreferenced, using a bot=yes parameter similar to the one recently added to template:BLP unsourced [1], to all articles identified as unsourced using the same algorithm as task 6, with the exception that the absence of Category:Living people would be required (to avoid overlap with task 6 and placement of a generalized template on articles requiring a more specific notice), and adding the following additional criteria for an article to be tagged:

  1. Does not transclude Template:Wi, or any redirect thereto, which would indicate that the page is a non-article referring the reader to Wiktionary, and that no sources are needed.
  2. Is not a redirect.
  3. Is not a disambiguation page so marked with template:disambig or any redirect to, or including the substring "disambig" as any portion of the page title.
  4. Does not transclude Template:Inuse, or any redirect thereto.
  5. Does not have a title containing the substring "list of" or "lists of" (while lists are not exempted from source requirements, it is often considered acceptable to places sources in articles to which the list links; "lists of" pages usually contain no content subject to WP:VER, but are simply internal directories of articles)
  6. Does not contain any transclusions of any template listed at Category:Citation templates, Category:Deprecated citation templates, Category:Germany external link citation templates, Category:Law citation templates, Category:Medical citation templates, Category:Science citation templates, Category:Specific-source templates, and all subcategories of Category:Specific-source templates.

To avoid producing excessive server load through nearly 3 million API queries to review every article on Wikipedia, the initial identification of unsourced articles would be performed via offline processing of a database dump using AWB's database scanner function. Erik9 (talk) 05:07, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Furthermore, in consideration of the guidance in the instructions for template:unreferenced to "Consider not adding this template to extremely short articles", the template will not be added articles transcluding template:stub, or any other template whose name contains the substring "stub" (as all stub templates listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types currently do). Instead, the task will add appropriately dated subcategories of Category:Articles lacking sources to unsourced articles transcluding stub templates. Erik9 (talk) 17:51, 31 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Am I to understand that you propose to tag every single article that doesn't have a ref or url with {{unreferenced}}? What purpose does the multiplication of such cleanup tags serve? (And in any event, it would have to exclude dabs.) Gimmetrow 07:00, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

To consolidate the criteria for tagging articles from here and task 6, mainspace pages would have template:unreferenced added to them if they met all of the following conditions.
  1. Does not contain Category:Living people
  2. Does contain any transclusions of template:unreferenced, template:BLP unsourced, or any redirects thereto
  3. Does not contain any uses of <ref> tags
  4. Does not contain any raw external links beginning with http://
  5. Does not contain any transclusions of any template listed at Category:External link templates or any subcategory thereof
  6. Does not contain the strings "ISBN", "ISSN", or "OCLC" (case sensitive)
  7. Does not contain any section title beginning with "reference", "footnote", "note", "external link", "source", "citation", "bibliography", "further reading", or "publication"
  8. Has never previously been edited by this bot for the purpose of adding Template:unreferenced, at the same article name.
  9. Does not transclude Template:Wi, or any redirect thereto, which would indicate that the page is a non-article referring the reader to Wiktionary, and that no sources are needed.
  10. Is not a redirect.
  11. Is not a disambiguation page so marked with template:disambig or any redirect to, or including the substring "disambig" as any portion of the page title.
  12. Does not transclude Template:Inuse, or any redirect thereto.
  13. Does not have a title containing the substring "list of" or "lists of" (while lists are not exempted from source requirements, it is often considered acceptable to places sources in articles to which the list links; "lists of" pages usually contain no content subject to WP:VER, but are simply internal directories of articles)
  14. Does not contain any transclusions of any template listed at Category:Citation templates, Category:Deprecated citation templates, Category:Germany external link citation templates, Category:Law citation templates, Category:Medical citation templates, Category:Science citation templates, Category:Specific-source templates, and all subcategories of Category:Specific-source templates.
Any article meeting all of these requirements likely does not have references, but, per Wikipedia:Verifiability, should. Adding template:unreferenced notifies editors of the problem and encourages remediation, both because of the notice produced on the article itself, and because the template adds the problematic articles to Category:Articles lacking sources or appropriate subcategories thereof. Erik9 (talk) 11:29, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Also, articles transcluding stub templates will not have template:unreferenced added to them, but will instead be placed into appropriate subcategories of Category:Articles lacking sources, as described above. Erik9 (talk) 17:51, 31 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
What about templates that come with references ({{GR}} is one I think)? - Jarry1250 (t, c) 14:56, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I've modified the above descriptions to exclude articles transcluding templates listed in Category:Citation templates and appropriate subcategories thereof. I will also add this functionality to task 6 operations, although I am not aware of any false positives occurring due to articles whose sole references were contained in citation templates and not otherwise indicated. Erik9 (talk) 16:16, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, task 6 has proceeded without any known false positives, which suggests that the proposed task here would also achieve a very high level of accuracy. Erik9 (talk) 19:24, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Do stubs need cleanup tags like this? Gimmetrow 19:52, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Stubs are not exempted from the source requirements of Wikipedia:Verifiability, nor do template:stub or the various subject matter specific stub templates by themselves indicate unsourced status. Erik9 (talk) 19:59, 30 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Some argue that stubs do not need cleanup tags which indicate the equivalent of "expansion". Even {{Unreferenced}} currently says "Consider not adding this template to extremely short articles", and it used to say more than that. Gimmetrow 15:36, 31 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Sourcing is not the equivalent of expansion - it is possible to have a stub which cites sources (or a long, unreferenced article), as stub status is determined primarily by the length of an article's text. Moreover, the characterization of template:unreferenced as a "cleanup tag" is itself questionable -- WP:VER is a core Wikipedia policy, which any completely unreferenced article blatantly violates. As a preliminary measure in remedying these policy violations, it is necessary to identify the offending articles. A list of unsourced articles is conventionally produced by placing them in subcategories of Category:Articles lacking sources. While this categorization is usually effectuated by through use of template:unreferenced, if the template is deemed excessively large in proportion to small articles, appropriately dated subcategories of Category:Articles lacking sources could be added to stubs directly. Therefore, I will modify the description of the task to reflect that articles transcluding stub templates will not have template:unreferenced placed on them, but will be appropriately categorized. Erik9 (talk) 17:39, 31 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Of course, placing an appropriate template or categories on a number of unsourced articles shouldn't be construed as an invitation to deletionist activism: editors are reminded that, per WP:BEFORE, the preferred remedy for unreferenced articles is to add reliable sources, and that AFD is reserved for articles reasonably believed to be unsourceable by editors familiar with their subject matter:

When nominating an article for deletion due to sourcing or notability concerns, make a good-faith attempt to confirm that such sources aren't likely to exist.

Erik9 (talk) 23:15, 31 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I've updated conditions 6 and 7 as described. With regard to accuracy and avoidance of false positives, my bot has a highly favorable record of performing similar identifications of unsourced articles, restricted to biographies of living persons, under task 6. While I obviously cannot have the bot edit any articles under this task prior to a trial approval, I can produce a "dry run", listing in userspace articles to which the bot would have added template:unreferenced or subcategories of Category:Articles lacking sources. It is believed, however, that Template:Better source, Template:Primary sources, etc need not be explicitly tested for, since, by assumption, such templates are only used where the article is sourced to some degree (and thus should not be identified by the bot as unreferenced at all), but the sources are considered to be inadequate. Testing for every template in Category:Citation and verifiability maintenance templates, and every redirect thereto, would require a great deal of effort to prepare regular expressions in the range of several megabytes, the processing of which would slow the bot's operations considerably, almost certainly without any benefit. Erik9 (talk) 02:17, 1 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Condition 13 will also need some refinement; many lists of articles don't explicitly identify themselves as such, and there is the entire category of Category:Outlines to consider. I suggest using a category-based method for detecting whether or not an article is a list.  Skomorokh  02:00, 1 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
In addition to having the bot identify lists by means of examining the page titles, I can have it avoid articles containing Category:Outlines, or any category whose title contains the substring "list". Erik9 (talk) 02:27, 1 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
To assist in the evaluation of the accuracy with which this task can be performed, I've created the first dry run, which lists 896 articles to which the bot would have added template:unreferenced or a dated subcategory of category:articles lacking sources. Erik9 (talk) 03:39, 1 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
While most of the articles listed in the first dry run were correctly identified as unsourced, a potential oversight is revealed in articles such as Adaptive predictive coding that transclude template:FS1037C, which can be construed as a source citation. However, not all templates listed in Category:Attribution templates are sufficiently specific as to constitute references (consider Template:USGovernment, for example). Tomorrow, I will begin a careful review of the attribution templates to determine which are acceptable references, and configure the bot to exclude articles transcluding them. Erik9 (talk) 03:52, 1 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I've created a second dry run, listing 2604 articles identified as unsourced by a recent reconfiguration of the bot. Erik9 (talk) 04:05, 2 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Will it remove refimprove when it adds unreferenced, or...? - Jarry1250 (t, c) 14:02, 2 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
In the second dry run, the bot was operated under the assumptions that it would only be adding template:unreferenced or subcategories of category:articles lacking sources to articles which are entirely unsourced, and that template:refimprove or similar templates would only be used on articles which have some sources, but whose sources are considered to be inadequate, and would therefore not appear on an article that the bot would edit. The second assumption hasn't held, however: a number of articles listed in the second dry run incorrectly contain {{refimprove}}, even though they are entirely unsourced. Additionally, one article transcluding the refimprove template, Airspeed Ltd., was incorrectly identified as unsourced because the phrase "further reading" was not tested for in section titles, a problem which I have since remedied. There are two ways to proceed when encountering a "refimprove" or similar template: the bot could assume that the template was correctly placed, and that the article was incorrectly identified as unsourced, and should be skipped. Alternatively, the "refimprove" could be assumed to be incorrect, and removed in the process of placing template:unreferenced or a subcategory of category:articles lacking sources in the article. I prefer the latter approach, as I believe that the bot's determination of source status can be achieved with a high level of accuracy. Erik9 (talk) 00:50, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. This will probably be the first of several trials. – Quadell (talk) 13:40, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Done; the results are available at [2]. Erik9 (talk) 03:36, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Why did the bot add] Category:All articles lacking sources to Collagen helix, rather than {{unreferenced}}? – Quadell (talk) 14:49, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Because the article contains a stub template ({{protein-stub}}). --R'n'B (call me Russ) 15:11, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I see. I looked through the rest of the contribs, and they look good to me. Anyone else have comments? – Quadell (talk) 15:46, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • What was the conclusion of the refimprove discussion above? I think those articles should be skipped by the bot. They may have had a source removed since the refimprove template was added. Perhaps the bot could generate a sample list of such articles for investigating how they are ending up that way.--BirgitteSB 17:24, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
You're right. Articles transcluding template:refimprove or similar templates will not be edited under this task. Erik9 (talk) 00:47, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (150 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Per a previous request, I'm extending the trial for further examination before approval. – Quadell (talk) 12:52, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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