Wikidata talk:Bots/Archive/2014

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Merging items

gerrit:116297 enables a new and easier way of merging items via the Wikibase API. You can write e.g.

pywikibot.ItemPage(site, id).mergeInto(pywikibot.ItemPage(site, otherId), summary=u'duplicate item')

Be careful since this API module doesn't accept the 'bot' parameter (yet), so you should first login with your bot account. --Ricordisamoa 12:57, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Subject matter restrictions on bots

What would be the appropriate policy or guideline to add subject matter restrictions on bots? One restriction that I believe should exist is that since dates in Wikidata are by default in the Gregorian calendar, bots should not extract any date from another source (such as Wikipedia) and add it to Wikidata unless the bot has a mechanism to confirm the date is stated in the Gregorian calendar. One such mechanism would be to check that the date is in the year 1924 or later, since Greece was the last country to switch from Julian to Gregorian, and that was in 1923. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:54, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

Mass-undo / mass-revert?

As we all know, mistakes can and will happen. Instead of merely delegating this issue to clean-up jobs after the fact, should it not be feasible for a Wikidata bot to itself undo what it has done? The structured data approach should entail that Wikidata is the ideal place for this kind of approach. (Although I admittedly have a limited knowledge about bot implementation, I haven't yet seen this kind of bot behavior when mistakes do happen; more often than not, semi-manual cleanups seem to be needed after mistakes occur.) -- Therefore, I would like to suggest making it a requirement for any bot that it is able to undo its last edit to any given item. (There could, for example, be a requirement that it should be able accept a list of items IDs plus a filter argument, e.g. how many of its own last edits to undo, or a date cutoff point for indicating 'all my edits since a particular date'.) Such a requirement could be adopted both in the bot approval process, making it a requirement for bot adoption, as well as in the underlying software. So what do you think, is this possible currently, or would it require some changes to the API or underlying software before it is possible to realize such a level of control? If it is already possible, or in the works, that would of course be great! Fred Johansen (talk) 17:22, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

This seems like a good idea. It's also needed for Widar; see e.g. User_talk:Yamaha5#instance_of_.28P31.29. Emw (talk) 18:54, 7 December 2014 (UTC)