Topic on User talk:Oravrattas

Would you considered adding a task for your "Position holder bot" that would check for instance of position (within scope of the bot of course) and add the Template:PositionHolderHistory to the talk page? This would generate Category:Position holder history, add a useful table to check position for gaps and could increase the visibility for the wikiproject every politician. I also ask I added 665 new public office positions (Mayors in the United States) and and instead of writing a script to do this once I thought it might be more useful to make a maintenance script that would cover all positions in scope of the template and automate monitoring to add the template in the future. The bot task might query with a patterns such as "Mayor of a place in *" and Iterate over the Q talk pages to check and add the template.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm quite hesitant to start automatically adding this everywhere, partially because it's quite tricky to decide programatically which positions it makes sense for and which it doesn't, but more because running this against even the few thousand positions it has currently been adding to is quite time-consuming, and adding, say, even every mayoral position would increase that by an order of magnitude.

I certainly wouldn't object if you, or someone else, were to add it much more widely, but if that's to be done by a bot, I'd definitely prefer it to be a standalone one, rather than adding it into the Position holder bot itself.