Changes by bots shouldn't show up

Today a troper told me about this. As you know, I am making very many changes - but the thing is, they change the markup, but not the content. I understand this, it's disappointing. So I suggest that my changes (and those of other bots, once they should join us) don't show up in recent changes, or watchlists. Though I don't know how hard this would be to implement. If I only could take a look at the code...

Get rid of the walled garden

I see what you are talking about (the other wiki does it too) and I agree mostly to not get the Edit Reasons page getting spammed, but we might want to wait until we have more than one bot working here.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Until we have a technical solution, I could simply enter no comment for my edits (unless I do them by hand). What I do is described on my troper page in any case.

Get rid of the walled garden

Here's my question: Do you use this account to do non-bot edits? Does it only fix pages that you edit manually? Or does it sweep the wiki's pages? [/curiosity]

Hyperforce Go! http://vmkid.me/

I am sure they wrote their troper page manually.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I meant outside their own page.

Hyperforce Go! http://vmkid.me/

If the edits are visible, I'd prefer the edit reason be visible as well, bot or not.

eta: I'd actually prefer that all edits have reasons, and generally use edit reasons for my edits, no matter how trivial, though I admit my record isn't 100%. But ideally, I think every edit should show up on the edit-reasons list, which would seem to make complaints about it getting "spammed" somewhat ... odd?

edited 9th Aug '12 4:27:13 PM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Possibly something like how a Reversion appears in an edit history- An edit with a reason is shown but no changes are.

For example, an edit from the bot might say "FELH 2 - Automated cleanup."

I think it's important to note that the edits are being done by a program, and not by a human.

edited 9th Aug '12 4:51:09 PM by VmKid

Hyperforce Go! http://vmkid.me/

I'm not quite sure how or why to distinguish what FELH 2 does from what I sometimes do when I copy-and-paste an article into my super-powerful programmer's editor (with built-in AI language) for some advanced manipulation, and then paste it back?

For that matter, a lot of what FELH 2 does looks an awful lot like a lot of my manual edits, except that they generally cover an entire page, while I usually do that sort of thing to just one or two sections before getting tired and bored. Do you want to hide my edits as well?

I also find seeing FELH 2's edits very useful, as it helps me spot learn which works have been namespaced, so I can fix them when I'm manually editing some other page.

eta: once the worst of the namespace migration is over, this sort of thing should become not a problem. At the moment, though, I'm not really seeing a big difference between FELH 2's one-big-edit-with-twenty-five-changes and the twenty-five separate edits to fix namespaces that were what was happening before FELH 2 came along. Both are distracting if you want to see the substantial changes to the page, but the bot is not actually making things any worse than they were. It's the namespace migration efforts that are causing the problem.

edited 9th Aug '12 5:18:10 PM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Self-Thumpinated.

edited 9th Aug '12 5:22:20 PM by VmKid

Hyperforce Go! http://vmkid.me/

You can already pretty much go ahead and namespace every work on a page. All you need to do is go back over and check the page so that if it turns out you changed something to a redlink, you make the redlink redirect to the page's current location. This saves effort later on once the page is eventually moved.

edited 9th Aug '12 8:50:28 PM by troacctid

Rhymes with "Protracted."

No, I really couldn't do that. It's probably not rational, but I find those backwards namespace redirects annoying, and have to stop and fix every single one I come across, no matter what else I might be doing. The idea of perpetrating one makes me shudder. :)

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Unless indexing is involved, links to works are supposed to be namespaced. If you're changing namespaced wicks to un-namespaced ones outside of an index, you are doing something wrong and creating extra work for other editors, redirects or no.

Using the namespaced redirect does two big positive things: First, it future-proofs the page for when the work is eventually moved to that namespace—one fewer wick to move later. Second, we want to drill the namespaces into our editors, and the best way to encourage that habit is to teach by example and have everything be namespaced—if some things aren't namespaced, it sends a mixed message and undermines this goal.

So please feel free to create and use redirects until the page is moved for real.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

By "fix" I mean, take the one or two minutes it takes to actually move the page to the namespace (swapping it with the redirect), update the indexes, move the reviews, call for the discussion to be moved, and list it on Administrivia.Wick Namespace Migration. I'm sorry, but having the redirect from the namespace just drives me up the wall. I can understand why you might do it, but I can't bring myself to do the same. The actual move (aside from fixing non-index wicks) is so little extra work, that I can't not do it.

eta: I know it's not rational. The fact that I don't feel that way about pages that are in main without a redirect from the proper namespace proves it. Nevertheless, somehow, it just rubs me the wrong way when I spot a namespaced redirect pointing to main.

edited 9th Aug '12 11:51:23 PM by Xtifr

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Also, on a weekly bases, I update the Namespace Migration Project Statistics - and, if people started creating backwards namespace redirects, it would just throw everything off-track. Of course, the statistics as they are already aren't accurate - as some of the namespaced pages are redirects to other namespaced pages. But doing this would throw things off, even more.

Well fair enough, do the extra work if you like, I certainly won't stop you there.

Rhymes with "Protracted."

Since someone asked: Sometimes I notice that my script made a mistake I have to correct by hand, or there are some links with a weird markup (recently had a problem with Hp Lovecraft [sic!] links), then I will correct those by hand. In these cases, I usually give "fix" as a reason, since it's generally a little fix.

edited 11th Aug '12 5:34:45 AM by FELH2

Get rid of the walled garden

One problem with the redirect-from-namespace is that it's completely wasted work. It eventually has to be redone completely. Not one bit of that work will end up in the final result when we get around to fixing it. Sure, it's only a trivial amount of wasted work, but then moving a page is pretty close to trivial.

It's also annoying when you make the namespace URI, expecting to be able to click on "Edit", and instead you get redirected back to main, so then you've got to manually create the URI a second time, with the "?action=edit" tag. Which is probably the part that drives me to grind my teeth in frustration when I stumble across it.

And it still doesn't solve the problem of making namespaces automatically work unless you somehow go through and do it for every work page on the wiki, right now! Which ain't gonna happen. So it seems a bit pointless.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Bumping to gauge interest.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Bad idea. Bot edits should remain visible. All edits should be visible.