Hi guys

Thanks again to Jon for his directions. I'm working through them. I have two additional steps, underlined below, that I need to do and I've tried to do them myself.

1. Delete all redirects that satisfy a certain regex. (regex is: ".*[^\w\s-].*" )

I'm ok with doing it in steps. I've tried something like this and first generate a list of the titles that need to be deleted, and then have the "delete" bot work on the generated list:

python pagegenerators.py -titleregex:".*[^\w\s-].*" -redirectonly

This task is to delete redirects that wont be of any use anymore. When I run that command, the bot tries to process all redirects, instead of the ones matching the regex. It may be that it cannot work on two different criteria at the same time (regex + redirectonly)? Maybe there's another way.

After that I'll move some pages around as per the directions below, generate some new redirects and then I need to do this for those new redirects:

2. A category needs to be added for all redirects that have a certain regex (its the same as above: ".*[^\w\s-].*" )

(same regex as above)

The category is so that after a month or two I can set the Delete bot to delete those additional redirects.

The problem I'm facing with the add text.py bot, is that it doesnt add text to redirects (hence, it cannot add a category to a redirect). When it gets to a redirect, it automatically skips it. I might be wrong in my findings but this is what I ran into.

Tasks 1 and 2 (underlined) are independent of each other and thats all I need to do. The rest of the text in this email is explanatory. If anyone knows how I can do them, I would be grateful again for the help.

I attempted to learn python a little bit and then wondered if I could make my own bot - its still too advanced for me and it might just be easier using the bots if I can learn how to do so.

Possible bots that could be used:

- add text: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikipediabot/add_text.py <- does not add text to redirects

- category (add): http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikipediabot/category.py <- It has a Regex feature, but again not sure if it will work on redirects

- page generator (generates list of pages for a certain regex, etc): http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikipediabot/pagegenerators.py

- delete bot: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikipediabot/delete.py (should work, once I have a list of redirects that need to be deleted, or edited to add text)

thanks!

Erik

From: Jon Harald Søby <jhsoby@gmail.com>
To: Eric K <ek79501@yahoo.com>; Pywikipedia discussion list <pywikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2012 8:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Pywikipedia-l] Need help for: Page rename / insert text / update links

2012/1/15 Eric K <ek79501@yahoo.com>

Hi guys,
I just installed the pywikipedia bot on my wiki yesterday. I'm new to Python but I can try learn it since I'm familiar with PHP. It would take me a while though to make this first bot since I'm new to the language. The tasks are pretty straightforward. I would like the bot to run without any user input and do all of this by itself:

1. For every page on the wiki, check if it has these three characters: ( , ) , : . Any page containing any of these characters (curly brackets and colon) will be moved to a new title. The original title is var_1.

2. For the new title, brackets are simply deleted, and the : (colon) is replaced with a " - " (a dash with a space on each side). The new title generated is var_2.

3. Insert this text at the top of this page: {{page_rename|var_1}}, and save page.

4. Find any existing links on the site to this page which would be in the format of [[var_1]], and change them to [[var_2|var_1]].

I don't need any menus or other functionality. Is something something pretty straightforward to make? I would appreciate any tips/help and if its something that can be made pretty easily, I would be really thankful if someone could do this for me or give me a good start.

I've looked at some of existing pywikipedia bot scripts (basic.py, movepages.py) but none of them would work for me and being new to Python, it would take me a long time to do what I need but in any case I will learn a lot in this first attempt.

thanks
Eric

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This is how I would do it. It is probably a hacky solution, and there may be better/more efficient ways of doing it, but it should work.

Step 1: Getting list of pages to change

Run this line:

python replace.py -regex -requiretitle:"\(|\)|:" "[A-Za-z0-9]" "test" -save:Pagestoberenamed.txt -start:!

Press "a" when it prompts.

This will not change anything, only save a list of all pages that need to be renamed. The script assumes there is either a letter or number in all the pages that needs to be changed.

Step 2: Put that template on top of the pages

Run this line:

python add_text.py -up -text:"{{page_rename|{{subst:PAGENAME}}}}" -file:Pagestoberenamed.txt

Step 3: Creating list for renaming files

Open the file "Pagestoberenamed.txt" in a regex-supporting text editor and use the follow regex replacements:

Replace:

#\[\[([^:]*):([^\]]*)\]\]

with

[[\1:\2]] [[\1 - \2]]

and replace

#\[\[([^\(]*)\(([^\)]*)\)([^\]]*)\]\]

with

[[\1(\2)\3]] [[\1\2\3]]

I don't actually have a text editor that supports regex, so instead I copypasted the contents of that file into a sandbox page, and ran the following line:

python replace.py -page:SANDBOX -regex "#\[\[([^:]*):([^\]]*)\]\]" "[[\1:\2]] [[\1 - \2]]" "#\[\[([^\(]*)\(([^\)]*)\)([^\]]*)\]\]" "[[\1(\2)\3]] [[\1\2\3]]"

Save the text as Pagerenaming.txt

Hacky solution, but it should work.

Step 4: Moving the pages

Run this line:

python movepages.py -pairs:Pagerenaming.txt

It will not prompt you, it will move the pages as specified in Pagerenaming.txt
If you do not want to have redirects from the old page names, use -noredirect as an additional argument. This may depend on how your wiki is set up, I know Wikipedias didn't have this option until relatively recently (and maybe it is only for administrators now).

Step 5: Fixing links
Links can be fixed using this line:

python replace.py -regex "\[\[([^:]*):([^\]]*)\]\]" "[[\1 - \2|\1: \2]]" "\[\[([^\(|^\[]*)\(([^\)]*)\)([^\]]*)\]\]" "[[\1\2\3|\1(\2)\3]]" -start:!

If you think it is too slow, you can append -pt:1 to that.

With this last one you should be careful, and approve quite a few changes manually first (pressing "y" and not "a"), in case something is fishy with the regex.

Hope this helps.

--

mvh

Jon Harald Søby