Yeah, all you need to do is remove the incorrect links from all affected articles.

You sorta did that with -localright. however that just fixed the correct article but still left some articles pointing to the wrong article. you need to fix every article, as long as one page has the wrong link it will be propagated back

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 8:01 PM, Marcin Cieslak saper@saper.info wrote:

(cross posted to wikitech-l)

Hello,

Recently we have found a case of incorrect interwiki entry linking [[:pl:Aktywizm]] describing philosophical concept with family of the articles on other Wikipedias regarding political activism.

This was a human mistake and it was reverted later. However, there seems to be no way to tell all the interwiki bots running to stop re-adding this removed link to articles.

I have added {{nobots}} on the Polish and English Wikipedia to prevent spreading of incorrect linking. I have tried from time to time to use my own pywikipedia bot to remove the link (using -localright option) and the result is the following:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ro/wiki/Activism?action=history

(Saperka is my script)

I spoke with the owner of WikitanvirBot and we have stopped it for a while completely to allow the "undo" script run and remove the links. Unfortunately, some other bot ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ro/w/index.php?title=Activism&dif... ) changed the link again.

It seems like it is not possible to revert one mistake unless ALL running interwiki bots will be stopped by their owners. Sounds like an overkill (and imagine coordinating this!).

Is there some way interwiki.py could be improved (I know it should be all different architecture) or some other way to handle this

• one could imagine - simple case?

Or are we now overtaken by robots beyond our control? :)

//Saper

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Pywikipedia-l mailing list Pywikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/pywikipedia-l

The first issue is indeed that the wrong interwiki has to be removed on _all_ languages to stop it from returning, but even with that one could still get into problems because there might be bots that visited some languages _before_ your removal, and others _after_ it. They would then consider the wrong interwiki to be a missing one on the languages visited afterward, and re-add them there.

Working with {{nobots}} as you have done is not a good solution, I think. Adding it on the Polish page could be justified, but on the English one it also stops a good amount of correct edits.

This particular issue I have now resolved by finding that there is a Dutch page on the same subject as the Polish one, and adding an interwiki to that one. This way, even if someone mistakenly adds the incorrect link again, for the bots this will lead to an interwiki conflict, so they will not automatically propagate the wrong link any more.