On 20/06/07, Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.com> wrote:
It was not done by "people using automation
software" unless you broaden
"automation software" into meaninglessness -- I used a tabbed browser.
Indeed. AutoWikiBrowser is a *browser*. It's basically a MediaWiki
client HTTP browser for doing tedious and repetitive editing, like
zapping gratuitous spoiler warnings in sections already headed "Plot
summary" or "Synopsis" or similar. There's a rendered version at the
top of the window (an embedded MSHTML control from Internet Explorer),
below that is a list of articles you can read in, a bunch of controls
and a window of wikitext to glance over.
There's restrictions on who can use the precompiled binary version
(the AWB checklist) - basically users of reasonable experience -
though it's GPL code and anyone can compile a copy themselves which
doesn't use the checklist if they have MS Visual Studio to hand.
It takes far less than one minute to determine that
"Three Little Pigs,"
"Thousand Nights and a Night," and "Hamlet" do not need spoiler
warnings. Using a more reasonable estimate of six seconds to scan an
article to determine if the spoiler tag is there to protect some
revelation on the order of someone dying in one of Shakespeare's
tragedies, we find that 45000 articles can be corrected by 100 editors
in (gasp) 45 minutes.
To be fair, I did zap 10-20,000 {{spoiler}} tags personally.
- d.