User talk:RingTailBot
I am a bot. Please comment on my owner's talk page: User talk:RingTailCat.
Bot suggestions are welcome here
Please feel free to suggest new tasks for the bot on this page, or on my regular talk page. RingTailCat (talk) 08:15, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
There are several ways to identify the pages the bot should work on.
- page title - provide a page title, e.g. "-page:Wolf-slayer (The Trollshaws)"
- category - provide a category, e.g. "-cat:Quests: Level 51"
- category tree - provide the top level category, e.g. "-catr:Virtue Deeds"
- file of page titles - e.g. "-file:localfile.txt"
- search - what you could put on the Special:Search page, e.g. "-search:questbox quest chain"
- and several more methods.
I can restrict the pages to a set of namespaces, e.g. just "Quest:" pages.
On every change, I am shown the changes, and prompted for an action.
Do you want to accept these changes? ([y]es, [N]o, [e]dit, open in [b]rowser, [a]ll, [q]uit)
Answering a auto-replies yes for all changes, otherwise, I examine the proposed changes, research the page in the browser (if necessary), and accept or reject the change.
The easiest type of bot is a replace bot. It uses search patterns and replacement text to change a page. I edit a configuration file to specify a task with a list of pattern and replacement text pairs, and then name that task when I run the bot.
More complex bots require add custom code to a basic bot.
In order to reduce the impact on other users of the wiki, the bot paces its updates to 1 every 10 seconds.
Quest Involvement
- "Involved in Quests" ⇒ "Quest Involvement"
Zimoon (talk) 08:51, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
- What pages should get changed? Item pages? Creature pages? NPC pages? RingTailCat (talk) 09:01, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
Newline between Template and Header
- "}}==Description" ⇒ new line between the parentheses and the header
Zimoon (talk) 08:51, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
- I am going to try that starting at Category:Deeds and recusing down the category tree. Lets see where that gets us. RingTailCat (talk) 09:01, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
- After 88 changes, I realized that many deeds appear several places in the deed tree. It is not very efficient to visit the same page several times. I'm looking at some alternative ways of collecting a list of pages to change. RingTailCat (talk) 09:26, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
- Ooh, so the script first gathers a list and then traverse the list? Yeah, it must start somewhere. Possibly that is the result of us dumping the same page in so many different categories under the same root, is it? Hopefully that becomes better over time, when we organize the categories a somewhat better, right? Zimoon (talk) 09:50, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
- The bot can work from a page list, but usually I use a category or category tree. In most cases, I manually approve every change. RingTailCat (talk)
- If you want to get all deeds, you could use the -transcludes:Deed argument instead of -catr:xxx. This makes the bot work on every page that uses the deed template, or transcludes another page using the deed template. That way it will only hit each page once. If you are confident the change won't cause any problems, and its hitting a lot of pages, you can reduce the amount of time the bot waits before editing the next page. When I was doing stuff before, even setting it to 1 edit per second didn't seem to cause any problems for others using the wiki. As long as you are around while its running so you can stop it if any problems do occur, it should be ok to set it faster. Amphoras (talk) 11:20, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
- Working back from the template does sound like a better approach. RingTailCat (talk) 12:38, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
Quest Mathom
{{Reward|Gift Mathom}} ⇒ {{Quest Mathom}}
This makes the quest also end up in the Category:The Mathom Society Reputation Quests similar to using the {{Quest Rep|faction|amount}} template. I wonder if we have such a template for the other two mathoms? I will have a look. Zimoon (talk) 06:32, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
- Replying to myself.
- Well-kept Mathom is a loot drop, none is reported as quest reward.
- Mathom, ditto. Zimoon (talk) 06:36, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
- It should be easy to convert the template for a Gift Mathom reward from the Template:Reward to Template:Quest Mathom. Very easy.
I've added it to the bot.
- It should be easy to convert the template for a Gift Mathom reward from the Template:Reward to Template:Quest Mathom. Very easy.
- Aaah, but I notice that Template:Quest Mathom is marked as obsolete. Unless otherwise rewarded with quest reputation, the quests that reward a Gift Mathom do not reward reputation unless you actually use the item. And you can't use it when you are kindred with the Mathom Society. So, on second thought, I'm going to comment out that change to the bot, while we get a broader concensus. RingTailCat (talk) 08:48, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
- Ooh, I noticed that now. I have added a question for Seth and right now I disagree with him for the reasons I posted at the template. Which more or less agree with you, the Gift Mathom does not automagically give reputation so Quest Rep is not the proper way, and Reward does not add to any categories whatsoever. And I do not think we should tweak the Reward so it does that just for this case, it makes that template "dirty" in my view, but I am not so much opposed to it either.
- The goal is to have the quest added to the Category:The Mathom Society Reputation Quests category as it is a potential reputation giver, whether the receiver may use the Gift Mathom or not. (It is BoA by the way.)
- Waiting is OK, just that we don't wait so long that we forget it, right now that category is emptier than it should be :)
- Zimoon (talk) 09:29, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
- The more I think about it, the more I think that these quests should not be classified as Mathom Society Reputation Quests at all. The reputation gain is acquired from using/consuming the item, not by completing the quest. RingTailCat (talk) 10:05, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
- Then we have no automated way of finding which quests give these items and via them better reputation. As far as I know there are no quests that give Mathom reputation right away, and that makes them a bastard group, hence I see no problem in breaking that "rule" in this case. Maybe I am overly pragmatic but if you can convince me that I am wrong... ;) Zimoon (talk) 13:21, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
- What about going to the Gift Mathom page and hitting Special:WhatLinksHere. Just for fun I added a list of all know quests which reward a Gift Mathom to that page, so the naive visitor does not need to do that. RingTailCat (talk) 15:21, 12 March 2012 (EDT)
Quest Reward Multiple items
The following:
{{Reward|X}} (xN) ⇒ {{Reward|X|N}}s, with variants of (xN) and N is a digit. I think I have seen both with and without parenthesis, both xN and Nx, with and without x. I searched for (2x) in Quest namespace and found quite a few. More than I am willing to fix manually other than when seeing them. -- Zimoon (talk) 04:10, 14 March 2012 (EDT)
- I have been thinking about that change also. I'll have a look at adding it in the next round of changes. RingTailCat (talk) 08:33, 14 March 2012 (EDT)
- Perhaps a more correct solution is to add a field or two to the item to support plurals. In English, I think most nouns can be pluralized using a few simple rules. It is the exceptions that are a problem. Then we have the common situation in game where item names are multi-word phrases, e.g. one Medallion of Moria, but two Medallions of Moria, where a simple rule might apply, but not to the last word of the name.
- I have a feeling that generating incorrect plural item names is worse that using the singular item name for a stack of items. Compare two Medallion of Moria and two Medallion of Morias. BTW, the set of items we need to be concerned about are the intersection of the set of items in Category:Quest Reward Items and the set of items where the stack parameter is greater than 1.
- RingTailCat (talk) 17:39, 14 March 2012 (EDT)
Crafted item change
I ran the bot to change
== Craft Information == Profession: [[Profession-Name]] Crafting Level: [[:Crafting#Crafting levels|Level-Name (Tier-Number)]]
to
== Craft Information == Profession: [[Profession-Name]] Crafting Level: [[Profession-Name Level-Name Recipe Index|Level-Name (Tier-Number)]]
The bot changed close to 6100 pages. RingTailCat (talk) 14:54, 21 March 2012 (EDT)
- Woohoo! I noticed the change on a relatively random Supreme Scholar recipe, and got pretty excited :P Thanks for taking care of this! Uzekh (talk) 16:22, 21 March 2012 (EDT)
- Great work! I recommend a change to Help:Crafting and Boilerplate:Item so that new items added will use that format. (Are there any other places?)
- The bot did cause some red links for the two professions (Forester and Prospector) that don't have individual crafting tier indexes: for example Item:Piece of Pristine Leather and Item:Ancient Steel Ingot. But there are few items in those professions, and it wouldn't be too hard to correct by hand. I see Uzekh is already fixing up some leftovers as I type. ;) -- Elinnea (talk) 17:27, 21 March 2012 (EDT)
- I cross-referenced all the items that were still linking to the Crafting page with all the items that are marked as Crafting stubs (the Crafting stub includes a link to the Crafting page). I'm confident that I've corrected all the items that were not already changed by RTB. The only items still linking to the Crafting page are stubs.
- The issue that Elinnea noticed was caused by the fact that there are no tiered recipe indices for either Forester or Prospector. The items with red links are thus linking to pages that do not exist (e.g. Prospector Master Recipe Index). I haven't changed any of these items, as I figured a bot would be better suited for the task. The Prospector and Forester items that I did change were items whose pages had not yet been edited by the bot, due to having slightly variant text. For these items, I modified the link to read
Crafting Level: [[Profession-Name Recipe Index#Level-Name|Level-Name (Tier Tier-Number)]]
- e.g.
Crafting Level: [[Forester Recipe Index#Apprentice|Apprentice (Tier 1)]]
- at the Log of Rowan Wood item page. This or something similar could be done to any Prospecting and Forestry items that were changed by the bot. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Uzekh (Contribs • User Talk) at 21 March 2012.
- I took care of the red-links for Prospecting and Forestry. Call me lazy if you like, but I created redirects to the appropriate sections in the combined index. RingTailCat (talk) 21:01, 21 March 2012 (EDT)
Bot Suggestions
Hi RingTailCat, err RingTailBot. The icon detector was part of my learning about how to write a bot (sorry about that misfire earlier today), though I don't actually have a functioning bot in the true sense right now. But I did notice you're now collecting ideas. My thoughts on why I started that a bit ago (other than just the learning in general) were to capture a few things. Not sure I have time to actually execute these, but since you're gathering ideas... :)
- Duplicate Icons (I can generate this report already, but it would be nice to fix it automatically, which I don't have)
- Completeness
- Report if a recipe has a critical success item listed, but no critical success %
- Probably more here like ensuring rarity entries on recipes when an ingredient is present, etc.
- Cross-page Consistency Reporting
- Recipes: Recipes appear both on the recipe index page and in the recipe itself. Many aspects (item, quantity, item for critical success) could at least be ensured to be internally consistent on Lotro-wiki (both should match)
- Recipe Ingredients: Check that the type (e.g. uncommon) of the item in a recipe matches the type of the underlying ingredient.
- Recipe usage: Recipes use things, and we generally have a "This item is used in these recipes" on the item page (mostly done for cooking, but should probably be done elsewhere as well). Again, an opportunity to check references (A<->B) for internal consistency
- Recipes Types: Things like Trail Food end up with their own index as well, and again, ensuring appropriate referencing/tagging here would be valuable.
- Equipment. The indexes like Light_Armour_(Level_1-21)_Index also suffer back-reference update issues, since those don't have the skirmish armour (or apparently any of the world drops? - just crafted?)
- Barter Costs: Items that have an index page for bartering (almost everything barterable, since it's either a skirmish barter or a particular NPC) tend to list the barter cost on the index and the individual page. Same check here - those two values should match!
- Quest rewards: Again, a back-reference issue (A<->B) that we might want to keep consistent.
- Cook Westfold seems to have acquired cooldowns on the index page - others could use this too... (but we'd want to scrub cooldowns first :) )
- Barter Format Consistency. There are at least 4 different formats used for barter items... and we should choose a format and stick with it, IMHO.
- Item:Decorated_Heritage_Rune_of_Lore (table)
- Item:Scroll_of_Lesser_Renewal (number on icon)
- Item:Rhymer's_Robe (number trails)
- Item:Medallion_of_Dol_Guldur (subreferences another page - amusingly in this case that use different barter formats)
- Locations. Often we have a [XN,YW] type thing in brackets, but that is not universal, a bot could catch location references that are not the appropriate type of link/reference
Some of these require more human intervention than others, but it might be useful just to be reporting these to a subpage of RingTailBot even if the bot doesn't actually fix anything...
Ideas by Artifact (talk) 21:06, 19 April 2012 (EDT)
- Thanks for the ideas. Hopefully, this will generate some feedback from other editors as well. RingTailCat (talk) 23:54, 19 April 2012 (EDT)
- There are indexes and other places that use _icon_ _name_ by hand, while other places use the Reward template, could consider replacement. -- added Artifact (talk) 09:47, 20 April 2012 (EDT)
- Internal consistency: Check item names vs. their application location (some suffer from copy/paste error). e.g. "Hauberk", "Shirt", etc. belong as "Chest Items" -- added Artifact (talk) 17:32, 20 April 2012 (EDT)
- Consistency on use of first-category, etc. in item templates (e.g. location is always third category in armour) -- Added Artifact (talk) 15:14, 21 April 2012 (EDT)
Removing pages in subcategory from root category
Would it be possible to train your bot to remove from a root category RC those pages that are already in a subcategory of RC? Specifically, I'm referring to Category:Titles and its subcategories (possibly others as well - haven't checked). There is a consensus in Category_talk:Titles that this should be done, but it seems the issue has been forgotten since then. Silver hr (talk) 03:59, 7 May 2012 (EDT)
- I will look into that. RingTailCat (talk) 05:40, 7 May 2012 (EDT)
- Done. RingTailCat (talk) 14:59, 9 May 2012 (EDT)