Is there someone operating a CatBot for deleting things like [[Category:FHM 100 Sexiest Women List]] from all the entries
It occurs to me (in a fairly inconsequential and rambling way) that this need is due to the software's use of inline markup for what should be out-of-line metadata - i.e. we can't have an easy database removal of a category, because the article end of the equation is stored in the text of the article, rather than (as well as?) separately in the DB.
It's kind of obvious, but it's a disadvantage that more and more features are encountering (interlanguage links and some template maintenance tasks are similarly hard to automate, for the same reason).
I know there's been an absolute ton of discussion about metadata, key-value pairs, etc, but I wonder if it's not worth going for a fairly simple system of having a "metadata" text-box which is actually a magic interface to special fields in the DB - the user edits special markup like they do now (for translations, categories, etc), but it's parsed at save and not actually stored as text (except perhaps in some kind of cache if necessary). That way, a lot of 'bots' could be integrated and operate at the DB level, rather than sitting outside the software and pretending to be users.
But I guess that's all just a pipe-dream, and there are plenty of things it doesn't solve. Maybe it would be better just to produce a special bot-friendly interface, instead (limitable to registered bot accounts); one that doesn't have to wait for and parse HTML responses, thus slowing down both it and the website...
I'll shut up now.