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Unlinking "AD" dates

The script seems to unlink "BC" dates (like 10 BC) correctly; could the same be done for 10 AD dates and such? Thanks! Gary King (talk) 18:40, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't see what's wrong with linking of such dates for historical reasons. There seems little point in having articles for these years if they won't be easily found by the typical amateur historian/reader. But perhaps I am alone in such an opinion. --Candlewicke (Talk) 15:00, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Gary, can you give an example where it doesn't? Lightmouse (talk) 14:03, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Tiberius Gary King (talk) 15:42, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I can't see '10 AD' in there. Can you quote the text for me and I will take a close look. Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 15:45, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

That was an example; right in the lead there is AD 37. Gary King (talk) 18:15, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I saw 'AD 37' i.e. 'AD xx' but I was confused by two things:

• You said it unlinks 'xx BC' but not 'xx AD' and that confused me because it is programmed to treat them both the same.
• 'AD 37' is not an example of either.

It may sound pedantic but software is inherently pedantic. Now that I understand what you mean, I can investigate further. It seems a reasonable request. I might not be able to do it immediately. Is there MOS guidance on the format of 'AD' i.e. should it go first, should there be a space? If I am tinkering with it, I might as well make it standard and compliant. Either you can put it on the wishlist at User talk:Lightmouse/wishlist or I will at some point. Lightmouse (talk) 21:11, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Should probably be 37 AD. Gary King (talk) 21:16, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I looked at the MOS but it did not express a preference. Shall we ask at wt:mosnum ? I would hate to create yet another stick for people to beat me with. Lightmouse (talk) 21:22, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Philosophically, some of these changes to the bot code are stuff that could easily be picked up on a test run where the bot generates a list of suggested changes and then people suggest corrections and improvements. Sure, some 'live' testing will always be needed (to actually prompt people to look at the changes, if nothing else), but where do you (Lightmouse) stand on the issue of how much testing should be done before starting something like this? I'm asking because some of the changes seem rather trivial (eg. the placement of AD and BC is something that could have been predicted, even without the benefit of hindsight) and something that could have been worked out beforehand, instead of being adjusted "in full flow" if you like. I know the logical response to this is to ask me to provide a list of "obvious" things, and if there is a page somewhere summarising what the code does (please don't point me at raw code) then I'd be happy to do that. Carcharoth (talk) 21:38, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Um, replace bot with script in the above? Bit confused now. Bot is stopped, but when running it used the script that you now use on your account (along with lots of other people)? Carcharoth (talk) 21:40, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Would recommend BC and AD only picked up if in capitals. ad and bc can mean many different things, in lowercase and with periods. British Columbia being the most obvious one (which is in capitals, unfortunately). Carcharoth (talk) 21:43, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Carcharoth, you have several questions there and I am not sure what you mean on some of them. Let me try to respond and hope that some of the responses are useful to you:

• You asked about test runs to generate a list of suggested changes. I don't have script that will do that. The script has been designed to delink dates and if the user cancels the edit, that is the end of it.
• You asked if there is a summary of what the code does other than the code. The answer is 'no' there is no summary other than the code.
• You offered to do something but I am not sure what you are offering.
• You suggested AD and BC only if in capitals. Yes, the existing code only addresses AD and BC when in capitals. Any new code would be the same.

I hope those answers are of some use but I probably missed something. Lightmouse (talk) 22:06, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

No, that's fine, thanks. I often ask for translations of raw code, but rarely get it. No problem. Carcharoth (talk) 22:10, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I think it is because the code does lots of things and it keeps changing in response to user requests (such as this one). If you wanted to try out the script for yourself, you would see. Lightmouse (talk) 22:23, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

See also User talk:Lightmouse/wishlist. That may give you more clues as to the dialog that goes on with users about the code functions. Lightmouse (talk) 22:24, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Helicopter

Hi, I undid your edits to Helicopter, which were just removing links to dates and years. Linking dates and years is recommended, and I couldn't see a good reason why to remove the links. I'll watch your talk page if you want to chat about this. Petemyers (talk) 16:38, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Hi,

Where are they recommended? The guidance at wp:mosnum says:

• Dates (years, months, day and month, full dates) should not be linked, unless there is a particular reason to do so.[

Regards Lightmouse (talk) 16:40, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Ah, sorry, they are recommended here: http://ang.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Tutorial_(Wikipedia_links) I'll reinstate your edit.

I find it a funny policy personally, it makes sense to me to link all dates, but if that's the guideline that's the guideline... I'll revert your edits back. Petemyers (talk) 16:50, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. Lightmouse (talk) 16:59, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I've responded on Pete's talk page with links to more information about DA and its removal. Tony (talk) 09:57, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Quick question

Is it possible to nominate categories for the bot treatment? These ones are pretty uncontroversial - I wrote nearly all the contained articles prior to the guideline changing (hence this is the only reason why they were linked to start with) and am the only editor of most of them, and all of the dates are dmy (already correctly formatted) and modern era, etc. All in, there's about 450-500 contained articles, I believe - would do them myself but my time available is woefully short.

The categories concerned are:

1. Category:Local Government Areas of Western Australia
2. Category:Former Local Government Areas of Victoria (Australia)
3. Category:Former Local Government Areas of Queensland

If not, that's OK, but never hurts to ask. :) Thanks for any help you can offer. Orderinchaos 02:57, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes. I would be happy to do that. You may wish to know that I have created User talk:Lightmouse/wishlist and this would be a suitable request there. Do you think anybody would object to running Lightbot on articles in those categories? Lightmouse (talk) 12:12, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

The only opposition I've seen has come from a different state, New South Wales - the key editors in and associated with the above states have been generally supportive of the new consensus, and without violating WP:OWN, the Victorian category there pretty much is mine. :P (Hence why I haven't added the *current* LGA articles for that state, as I didn't write those.) Orderinchaos 15:40, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I believe you are asking for delinking of full dates, is that correct? Lightmouse (talk) 15:43, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Correct. I haven't historically linked years in my own writing (and even before this standard came out, often delinked them when doing other work on articles) so it was only the link autoformatting I used. If there's any issues with the convert template usage (lk=on etc) feel free to fix. Orderinchaos 15:51, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I wanted to check because you mentioned 'bot'. My bot is 'Lightbot' but it is not permitted to delink full dates. I have to do that as 'Lightmouse'. I can either use the monobook script (I see you have that too) or AWB. Clearly AWB is faster. I generally delink 'common units of measurement' in accordance with the guidance at wp:overlink. Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 15:56, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Done. Lightmouse (talk) 16:27, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much - appreciated. Orderinchaos 22:54, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Question

When you are running the AWB script to unlink dates and years, are you reviewing each one to make sure that it is appropriate to remove the link? -Chunky Rice (talk) 20:18, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

If I may jump in, my response to Bellhalla, above, is relevant here. How would anyone determine this? Should an editor carefuly scrutinise the article (and, presumably, its history and its talk page, and its archives) to determine whether the linking was intended? How many articles have any discussion whatever on that subject? Almost universally, an editor came along and linked all the dates for autoformatting, probably in the course of making some other change, because that was what the MoS recommended, or linked bare years because they'd seen it so many times elsewhere and thought that was what WP required; and no-one commented on it. So there's no discussion to find.

The thinking behind this question appears to be that no outsider should ever change anything in an article without consulting the existing editors first. This run quite contrary to the spirit of WP:BE BOLD. If the change turns out to be unhelpful, or misunderstands something that's not immediately obvious to an outsider, there's always the revert button. And it's reasonable to presume that a change that's in accordance with the MoS will be the right thing to do in almost all cases. Colonies Chris (talk) 08:14, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

No, changes in accordance with MoS are usually enforcing a "consensus" of a handful of opinionated cranks. MoS should respond to WP rather than the other way around. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 17:07, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

I never said anything about consulting other editors. I asked what discretion is applied to each edit. It has nothing to do with the intent of the original linker. It has to do with whether the link has any value. And why won't anybody let Lightmouse actually answer a question for himself? A lot of people have asked some very reasonable questions, but instead of responding he just defers to Tony or others to respond for him.

I have no problem with running a script to remove links AS LONG AS discretion is being applied. If no discretion is being applied, then it's no different than running a bot, which would be unacceptable. All I'm asking for is a confirmation that the user spends a couple seconds looking at each change to ensure that 1) the link doesn't serve any purpose and 2) no errors are produced. I don't think that's unreasonable to expect. -Chunky Rice (talk) 17:14, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Anderson, will you make me a small, colourful template to label myself as "an opinionated crank"? I rather like it. Tony (talk) 18:37, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

CR, since you aren't prepared to suggest any practical means for an editor, human or bot, to make such a determination, your question is both empty and tendentious and LM is quite right not to answer it. Colonies Chris (talk) 19:38, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

My question is simple. Is discretion being used in these scripted edits? It's not a trick question. I don't understand what you mean by "practical means." You read the sentence (or paragraph or whatever you need for context) and form an opinion. Is the link useful? Yes or no. It's not complicated. -Chunky Rice (talk) 20:43, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and obviously, a bot is incapable of making such a determination, so I'm not sure why I'd try to suggest a way that it could. -Chunky Rice (talk) 20:44, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Sometimes a bot can be programmed to make an intelligent guess. I still think the best results come when bots and humans work together. A bot does the gruntwork to produce some lists and, crucially, present the list in an easily readable and checkable form. And then humans process the lists and filter out the mistakes. Then the list is passed back to the bot for it to do the edits (though it needs to check that things haven't changed since the initial check was made). Carcharoth (talk) 00:12, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

As Carcharoth suggests, there is pre-processing, processing, and post-processing. The 'discretion' is applied at the whole article level rather than for each link within an article. For example, if you created a list of articles that contain the text '2008', it would clearly contain the '2008' article itself plus articles such as '2007', '2009', '21st century'. Either the list itself can be purged of those articles or the bot can be made to skip such articles at run time. Once an article is in a list, Lightbot will process it according to the code. There is post-processing 'quality control' but in getting on for half a million articles that have had link-reduction, I would not be surprised if the quality were well in excess of 99.9%. Generally, if Lightbot will delink a solitary year link, so will the Lightmouse code. The main differences being that the Lightmouse code will also delink autoformatted dates and there is more oversight during the three phases (pre-processing, processing, and post-processing) for Lightmouse. Lightmouse (talk) 12:06, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks - that's the information I was looking for. I appreciate the direct response. -Chunky Rice (talk) 16:54, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Birth and death years and categories

Hi Lightmouse. Would you have time to read the two posts I made here and here? Part of the reason I think some people (or me, at least) objected to the removal of links to birth and death years (that is year links, not the month/day links which really are trivia) was due to the potential metadata implications. Birth and death year metadata currently resides in several places on biographical articles: Misplaced Pages:Persondata, the birth and death categories (the largest set of data), infoboxes, and links from birth and death years. The trouble is that this is not completely consistent, and if I could program a bot to do a "biographical audit" (as you've been doing a "date audit"), then one of the things I would check is whether birth and death categories existed before removing birth and death year links. One of my questions was whether your bot can tell when it is editing a biographical article and whether or not the birth and death categories are present? Would you be able to analyse the contributions log of Lightbot to see how many biographical articles it affected? Or alternatively, do you think you could do any of the other (admittedly rather large) tasks I suggested in those posts? I wouldn't normally make a personal request like this, but I've tried bot requests several times, and sometimes people have taken this on, but with mixed results. If it's not your sort of thing, don't worry - I just thought I'd ask. Carcharoth (talk) 00:09, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

You have asked quite a few questions and I can't provide all the answers.

• If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting delinking a birth year if that article is also in the category 'births in xxxx'. It is possible to create a list of articles in the category 'births by year' and to remove all solitary year links from the article.
• Unfortunately, I do not know of a method for analysing the contributions log of Lightbot in the way you suggest.
• AWB has a facility to create a list of articles within a category AND in subcategories. It should be possible for anybody with an AWB account to provide such a list and the count for you. It is not a trivial task and it may be prone to errors. I don't have time to do it right now but I support your attempt and may try to get a crude estimate for you.

Lightmouse (talk) 11:42, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Using the AWB search method called 'category (recursive)', for 'births by year' it comes up with 519,343 articles. I hope that helps. Lightmouse (talk) 12:17, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

It does help, thanks! It would help if someone could get a similar figure from the "deaths by year" category (and its subcategories), but I appreciate that such large recursive counts take time. The ultimate goal is to consistently keep track of the biographical articles that lack birth and death categories, but as you might have seen on my talk page, User:Dsp13 has pointed out some pages generated back in March, listing some tens of thousands of articles lacking these categories. See User:Dsp13/Living people needing categorization by year of birth and the associated pages. The root of the problem is that basic biographical data common to nearly all articles is recorded in several different places, and lots of effort is wasted updating the same information in more than one place, or keeping it all synchronised. For example, birth and death years are often recorded in plain text in the article, in an infobox, in the birth and death categories, and in the persondata template. Having the same information repeated four times on hundreds of thousands of articles seems terribly inefficient, but that is the system that has grown up. Anyway, I know this is a fair way outside the date debate, so apologies for taking things so far off topic. Thanks again for the response. Carcharoth (talk) 20:26, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

The AWB figure for category (recursive) 'deaths by year' is 235,313. I hope that helps. Lightmouse (talk) 22:54, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah. Silly me. I see that what I wanted was the figure for pages with a death category but no birth category. But that is probably a little too compicated. What I'm after is: number of pages with WPBiography on the talk page (542,884) minus the OR total of Birth category (519,343) and Death category (235,313). In other words, the number of WPBiography pages without either birth or death category (some pages have one and not the other). However, the datasets are not 'clean'. The WPBiography transclusion list is messed up by "group" articles, and not all pages on the category lists have WPBiography on their talk page (that has probably got worse recently). Living people have a category so you can easy track changes to this group. People as a whole (dead as well as living) don't though. Putting WPBiography on the talk page is a kludgey way of doing for all biographies what the "living people" category does for living people. Oh, I'll stop here as rehashing what I said nmonths ago isn't really the thing to do here. But thanks for listening. :-) If you ever feel like running these sorts of queries (especially finding out how many WPBiography pages lack DEFAULTSORT), let me know. There is quite a bit of background to this. User:Carcharoth/Polbot3 trial run is one jumping off point. But I really will stop there, as doing something as ambitious as that is terribly time-consuming. Carcharoth (talk) 23:36, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Common terms delinking

Hello, great work on the delinking script, really appreciate it. One small thing, I've found that ] does not get automatically delinked by the script. Could you fix that, or is it purposefully left alone? Thanks, indopug (talk) 12:07, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

It should not be. That is not something that should be dealt with on autopilot. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:15, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Done. Please test it and let me know it works ok for you. I get a lot of requests of this type so I have created User talk:Lightmouse/wishlist so you can see what others are asking for and add your own wish. Lightmouse (talk) 11:06, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

It works fine, thank you. indopug (talk) 04:42, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

inconsistent dates

Hi
I noticed in this edit, where you unlinked dates via AWB, that the dates weren't changed to a consistent style throughout the article (e.g. it left "January 12, 1990" and "11 December 2006"). I thought that I saw Tony always do that, and if I'm not mistaken using your javascript. Can't a similar mechanism be integrated into AWB as well?
Thanks & Cheers, Amalthea 17:17, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Tony uses the monobook code that I wrote. It has option buttons that let you decide in real-time whether to convert to mdy or to dmy format. I can use the monobook code or an AWB script. The AWB script does not permit options in real-time but it does run a lot faster. I have gone back to that article and done a date audit using the monobook. I hope that helps. Keep up the good work. Lightmouse (talk) 17:25, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Sure, I was just wondering. Thanks for getting back & Cheers Amalthea 17:40, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Weirdness

I'm not sure about this sort of stuff. What are the xx's supposed to do? Apart from turn a bad blue link into a badder red link that is. Paint me confused, Angus McLellan (Talk) 21:21, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

The 'xx' should not be there. I have updated the article. I could explain what happened but it is not an enjoyable story. Thanks for letting me know. I have returned them to their 'bad blue' state where they look like solitary years. I am sure that they will continue to be ignored by users. Keep up the good work. Lightmouse (talk) 22:20, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

No worries, I just wondered if there was something I was missing. They'll be unlinked sooner or later. If not by you, then by me. Angus McLellan (Talk) 22:29, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 22:31, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Ireland

I noticed that you added Ireland to your code. I recommend also adding aviation. I added it to mine because I ran into it several times.--Kumioko (talk) 22:20, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Are you referring to 'xx'? Lightmouse (talk) 22:30, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, its the change you just made today.--Kumioko (talk) 22:35, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for spotting that and letting me know. Lightmouse (talk) 22:42, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Delinking dates

Thanks for contacting me. You are doing a very good job! I am using User:Yobot that runs through hundreds of articles, so it could be great if I could use it to help delinking dates. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:13, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Let me know if there is any way that I can help. Lightmouse (talk) 15:58, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Merge proposal

Please see WT:Only_make_links_that_are_relevant_to_the_context#Break 1 for the current discussion. I'm letting everyone know who has a comment on the relevant talk pages. Obviously, we're not going to push anything through without a full discussion of every issue, including whether to merge at all. My sense is that there's wide agreement on all the big points, but the devil is in the details. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 18:28, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Date templates

Hi,

You seem to have an interest in dates, and to have a script used for their mark-up. May I ask that you take a look at {{birth date}} (& {{birth date and age}} ) and {{start date}}, and their use in the hCard and hCalendar microformats? Would it be possible for your script(s) to facilitate their use, where appropriate? I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:30, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

What do you want me to do? Lightmouse (talk) 15:22, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Firstly, I just wanted to make sure you were aware of those templates, and their purpose, and those two microformats. Then, if possible, it would be neat if people making changes like the "original air dates" in this one, using your script (with which, I confess, I am not familiar), were offered the option to have the output formatted using one of the relevant templates. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:47, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Rod Stewart

hello Lightmouse - i noticed that Lightbot did something a bit odd on the artcle on Rod Stewart: it looks like it unlinked just one year of many dates in the article. i went ahead and fixed a bunch of the dates by hand (along with some other changes) but i thought it might be worth letting you know about this rather odd behaviour of your gallant bot. Sssoul (talk) 09:49, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Hi,

Lightbot does not change the format. The article was already in US format. It sounds like you are prevented from seeing such errors by your preference setting. Many editors switch off preferences so that they can see these errors and fix them. Have you considered doing that?

Unfortunately, Lightbot does not have permission to delink all dates. I wish it did. If you are interested in this issue, please join the extensive discussions at wp:mosnum.

I have gone over the article using a different script and done a full date audit in just one click. There were *lots* of date errors. If you want to make use of the script, just let me know. Lightmouse (talk) 10:01, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

thanks for fixing all those dates and sorry for mistaking the first change for a US/UK deal - i am distinctly undercaffeinated! i've swtiched off my preferences and will now go look at the wp:mosnum discussion; meanwhile i'm not sure i'm technologically equipped to use the date-changing script - i use zonealarm, and i know that can be a problem with some scripts & other wikigizmos. i do a lot of date-fixing by hand, though! thanks again. Sssoul (talk) 10:08, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Now that you have turned off your preferences, you will see lots of these errors. I warn you, the discussion at wp:mosnum can be a bit scary.

I can't see Zonealarm being an issue with the script. If you want to try it, here are the instructions anyway. Go to User:Sssoul/monobook.js and add:

importScript('User:Lightmouse/monobook.js/script.js');

then save the page. Then clear your cache according to the instructions on the page. That is all. When you next edit a page, look in the 'toolbox' at the bottom left below 'What links here'. You will see 'Delink dates to dmy' and 'Delink dates to mdy' plus some other handy one-click options. Anyway, I will leave it up to you. Keep up the good work. Lightmouse (talk) 10:16, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

"the discussion at wp:mosnum can be a bit scary" smile: yes, i see what you mean! personally i'm really happy about the verdict to unlink dates/years, so after i get some more caffeine in my system i'll see if i can grasp how to enable/use this script. thanks and swing on! Sssoul (talk) 10:44, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

... well, either the caffeine isn't working or the script isn't - i've tried twice to import it, cleared my cache a few times, restarted my browser (firefox) and it still doesn't show up in the "toolbox". if you have a minute to let me know what i'm doing wrong - and/or how to get rid of that "sssoul/monobook" page if it's just somehow not compatible with my technology - i'd be very grateful - thanks Sssoul (talk) 11:26, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

It won't appear until you have a page in edit mode. Lightmouse (talk) 11:29, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

ah so! thanks very much Sssoul (talk) 11:44, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Glad to see you got it working. Any questions just ask. You may also request changes at User talk:Lightmouse/wishlist. Regards Lightmouse (talk) 11:58, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

AWB bug affecting your module

Hi, I've just started using your script as part of my general fixes (I'm migrating over to the module option, much more powerful..). Thanks for an accurate script. I wanted to advise you of one AWB bug that I found that affects the script: see here. I was combining your fixes with my own and had some terrible trouble with a cite template fix I was using. After a few hours of swearing at my computer I found the above bug! Thanks Rjwilmsi 13:40, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I have commented there. Lightmouse (talk) 13:47, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Lightbot

Your bot replaced ] with 8051 because it was a date. ] was wrong but not for that reason. Mike92591 (talk) 18:14, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Aha. Thanks for spotting that and fixing it. It is an extremely rare false positive but I should be able to avoid it. Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 18:30, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

No problem, it actually seems to be a fairly common occurrence among the old school Intel processors (4004,4040,8008,8048,8080,probably a few more). You might want to look into those cases too. Mike92591 (talk) 18:48, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the examples. I will work on it. Lightmouse (talk) 18:53, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

More examples on Forth (programming language): 6502, 6800, 8051. Could you at least fix your bot to avoid a double edit in case non-years are manually reverted? One idea: check whether potential year links to remove are redirects instead of actual pages. Bonus if you substitute the redirected link. --IanOsgood (talk) 23:27, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Using a specific range might not be a bad idea either. Mike92591 (talk) 00:09, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I was planning on getting the code to avoid numbers beginning 3 to 9 because 1995 and 2008 begin with only a 1 or a 2. However, I forgot that there are three digit years that begin with those digits. I then started thinking that I would check the processor names and articles like 8086 are actually redirects from 'Intel 8086' So I thought that I would run through and correct all the redirects in the articles. But then it seemed that the corporate and technical naming was not straightforward. Is there a place where we can go to get general agreement on the article names anywhere? Lightmouse (talk) 00:07, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I believe that I have found a way to exclude numbers beginning with the digits 3 to 9 but only if the number has 4 digits. Lightbot is running with the new patch now. Thanks for the feedback. Lightmouse (talk) 00:37, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Single change on article with lots of linked dates

One of your bot edits popped up on my watchlist. This one. I went to look at Soviet and Russian manned drifting ice stations and I saw a whole load of links in the articles. I was about to de-link them all, and put in a missing geo-coord template, but thought I should check here first. Was there a reason for delinking a single year and nothing else? If not, I'll be happy to go and delink all those dates. Carcharoth (talk) 22:04, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Lightbot is not permitted to delink full dates. It is permitted to delink solitary months but that feature is currently switched off. Thus the only date that it could edit in that article was the solitary year. So go ahead and do the rest if you wish. Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 00:00, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Damage to Frank Worthington page

Hi, please take a look at this edit where 'Lightbot' has mangled the page. Smile a While (talk) 22:06, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for catching that and fixing it. The code has been updated so it won't happen again. Thanks for letting me know. Lightmouse (talk) 23:57, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Whatcha Think About That

An article that you have been involved in editing, Whatcha Think About That, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Whatcha Think About That. Thank you. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? raven1977 (talk) 23:59, 5 October 2008 (UTC)