WikiApiary talk:Operations/2013/February

Bot log
The revamp of the bots that I'm working on made some good progress. Notably, the bots now log to ApiaryDB and there is now a page at Bot log that uses Extension:External Data to show recent information on the wiki. I suspect this will be a huge win for operators. Thingles (talk) 04:34, 2 February 2013 (UTC)


 * It's worth emphasizing that this is only for the new version of the bot. The current one running does not log here, so until I get the new one doing the day-to-day work this will just show my debug runs. Thingles (talk) 04:42, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Skin:Main Page
Today I put in an entire new namespace for Skins, along with Form:Skin, Template:Skin and other miscellaneous stuff to track skins. Check out the Category:Skin to see. Some unique things to take note of. Skins can have related extensions associated with them (see Skin:Vector). Also, skins can indicate that they were derived from another skin (see Skin:Vectorata). Thingles (talk) 04:36, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Transcluding to get refresh faster
I made a change today to Template:Website to purposefully transclude the bot generated subpages for a Web site even when they don't exist. I'm hiding them in a  so the user can't see, but MediaWiki sees it and properly notes that the page is using a red link template. The new version of Bumble Bee will pull these pages on demand, instead of just once a day. Doing this transclusion will hopefully result in a faster refresh when the pages are updated on demand from the bot. Thingles (talk) 04:41, 2 February 2013 (UTC)



Add SMW Wiki of the Months?
I added the recently announced SMW Wiki of the Month using a specific tag. Would be cool to tag all the historical wiki of the months as well. Thingles (talk) 12:39, 3 February 2013 (UTC)


 * This can be done. However, I think there is only one other of them here. The rest still has to be added. --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 13:10, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Bumble Bee cleaning up Extension authors
When I added the code to automatically populate Property:Has extension author I noticed right away that my simple method of just placing the string returned by the API in there had some challenges. Most people use commas to separate names so that worked well, but it is fairly common to put wikitext in the author field so that authors names are clickable. This caused all sorts of problems when showing automatically generated author groupings. So, I put some regular expression filters in to clean these up before they are added to WikiApiary. The block looks like this:

temp_author = x['author'] temp_author = re.sub(r'\[\[.*\|(.*)\]\]', r'\1', temp_author) temp_author = re.sub(r'\[\[(.*)\]\]', r'\1', temp_author) temp_author = re.sub(r'\[\S+\s+([^\]]+)\]', r'\1', temp_author) temp_author = re.sub(r'\sand\s', r', ', temp_author) temp_author = re.sub(r'\.\.\.', r'', temp_author) temp_author = re.sub(r' ', r' ', temp_author) temp_author = h.unescape(temp_author)
 * 1) Authors can have a lot of junk in them, wikitext and such.
 * 2) We'll try to clean that up.
 * 1) Wikilinks with names
 * 2) " Foo Bar"
 * 1) Simple Wikilinks
 * 1) Hyperlinks as wikiext
 * 2) "Jeroen De Dauw"
 * 1) Misc text
 * 1) Lastly, there could be HTML encoded stuff in these

template_block += "|Extension author=%s\n" % (temp_author)

This helped a lot and you can already see improvements. Very importantly, this keeps square braces from getting through which caused problems in the templates themselves. If you think of other filters like this that would help let me know and I can easily add them. This list of hundreds helps see what they look like now (note that a full SMW Refresh that happens every night should clean up stragglers). The main downside of this are authors that use handles as opposed to names, but that is where overriding the automatic generation with manual authors is a better tact. Thingles (talk) 01:41, 5 February 2013 (UTC)