If a bot is going crazy, please leave a note at User talk:R3m0t as well so that I notice sooner Anything not to do with my bots should go to User talk:R3m0t
Please add new discussion to 'Run on " ," #1' or 'Random stuff'.
I've made a list of articles which have spaces before commas (6518 articles). I think maybe a bot could do this:
I've also made other lists:
What do you think? Alternatively, I could post some reports (about 45 pages with 100 articles per page which provide context around the error, similar to the repeated words reports I made [1]) r3m0t 11:26, Feb 21, 2005 (UTC)
The bot is now running making one change a minute without the bot flag. This is the log for today and tomorrow (with some earlier entries removed as I have since changed the log format) and various things are at stuff.php, including a list of upcoming articles, stuff that were fixed and stuff which it thinks were already fixed. There is also a counter showing the time until the next run. Note that currently it does not go back to check its edits. However, the backlog of changes it has made remains (in the database). If it were to check 2 a minute, it would catch up in - ooh, a day? Of course, I might implement that feature sooner, in which case, all the better. r3m0t 22:11, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
There were problems with some characters which screwed up many tags and tables. Unfortunately, grammarbot did about 100 edits before I noticed and stopped the bot. Not all of these edits were problematic, but for simplicity all were reverted in an hour or so. I'm waiting to recieve (conditional?) permission to run it again, after (some of?) the things detailed on User talk:Grammarbot have been done. r3m0t 01:16, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)
It's up again without any problems (not even at Anglesey ;)) and I hope to get the bot flag in a few hours or so. I'll apply. I'll also list it on Wikipedia:Bots. r3m0t 22:35, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)
Which of these should I use next? What about after that? Which of these should I definately not do?
The comma thing is due to finish in a few days. Note that if you think a human is needed to do any of these, I can create some very nice reports easily. r3m0t 17:12, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
The full list of entities is here. We are using XHTML 1.0. r3m0t 10:33, Mar 5, 2005 (UTC)
Grammarbot is now marked as a bot on this Wikipedia. If you ever need this flag removed, just ask at m:requests for permissions. Angela. 12:03, Mar 5, 2005 (UTC)
I'm assuming that this is not a deliberate vandalbot, but in its effects at Adrian Nastase, it might as well have been. Among other things, it is systematically screwing up HTML entities. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:36, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
It also screwed up the formatting on Anglesey requiring a revert. Velela 23:04, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Err... incredible. Is there any way to revert all these automatically? Is this the death knell of my bot? r3m0t 23:14, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Didn't Angela have a bot against this? (Yes, I really did stop the bot by now.) r3m0t 23:17, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
It's only about a hundred pages. I'm pretty sure they're being manually reverted as we speak (I did one. :-) And after all, some edits were probably completely uncontroversial. Hey, worse things happen. It's not the Willy on Wheels. :-) 82.92.119.11 23:23, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I've done (from the most recent) up to American Association for the Advancement of Science. Phew. r3m0t 23:32, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
I wish I could help out, but I desperately need to catch some Z's. Try soliciting some brute force on the IRC channels. An admin (there are always some on the channels) may even have a bot handy for such things. 82.92.119.11 23:40, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Problems, then:
Sorry again. I can't imagine why this happened. Testpage at User:R3m0t/Sandbox and will be tested properly before re-enabling. r3m0t 23:13, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)
If this ever runs again, please consider having it ignore everything between <math> tags, since that is often formatted for ease of reading while editing. Ben Cairns 00:05, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC).
This appears all fixed. HOWEVER:
Yours, r3m0t 01:09, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks Grammarbot this time it seems fine and Anglesey has survived the experience. Velela 22:26, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
code tags
I will check these one by one and add explanations. From this we shall see what exceptions may need to be coded in. Feel free to update this list by pasting in new items as they show up here, but please leave tme to the analysis. r3m0t 00:09, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)
Now it should remove about three spaces before a comma. I just call the same fixing function three times. r3m0t 13:31, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)
What's the policy on wikilinks? Communes of the Nièvre département removed a space from Asnois ([[Asnois , Nièvre|Asnois]] --> [[Asnois, Nièvre|Asnois]]), which is ok (good, even) as it was a red link; but if it hadn't been…yikes! Joestynes 06:11, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
What's proper in a finite list after an ellipsis: x1, x2, x3, ... , xN or, after Grammarbot, without a space before the comma x1, x2, x3 ..., xN? Not sure there's any difference displayed after cdot in math markup. Sorry if my ignorance wastes any time. --Eddie | Talk 13:53, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I noticed in exponentiation the bot changed something of the format "a ,b" to the format "a,b" when it should have changed it to "a, b". Cheers. CryptoDerk 14:42, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
I figure you'd get a lot of dings about what didn't work. I'd thought I add at least one "attabot" for the many more that worked fine. I noticed about a dozen. Thanks. --A D Monroe III 21:45, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
FYI: Grammarbot found and fixed the space before the comma in Japanese New Year, but only found, but did not fix, the space before the comma in Japanese poetry. BlankVerse ∅ 08:42, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Also: I am wondering if it might be worth creating a page listing all the articles where you've wfound problems that needed correcting. The reason I am suggesting that is that I've noticed that when someone has gone through specific common errors on an article page that is in my watchlist, that is a good indication that there is probably other errors on that page, and a quick spell-check (I use the SpellBound extension in the Firefox browser) usually finds 3-5 more spelling errors on those pages. On the other hand, someone who was interested in following in the wake of the grammarbot looking for spelling errors could also just use the "User contributions" link. BlankVerse ∅ 08:42, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Medical_analysis_of_circumcision has been failing for ages (see end of today's log). I ought to make it give up eventually and go to the next article, I suppose. I'll investigate. r3m0t 22:42, Mar 5, 2005 (UTC)
Careful with ASCII art there! Today Nerd Boy article got vandalized by this bot. There should be a check probably whether a line has a leading space to prevent further incidents like that. Grue 07:02, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
You appear to have left two conflicting messages on my talk page within ten minutes, I'm not sure which of the two you intended to leave. Would you mind awfully removing one because I'm not sure which you mean to tell me, thanks. Although I do admit that there is one message I didn't remove, I had to leave in a hurry, sorry. :). Rje 04:52, Feb 10, 2005 (UTC)
Can grammarbot please say what it is changing in the edit summary?
You can't even see what it has changed in the diff without careful scrutiny, since there is nothing to turn red. This will prevent us from having to view the diff at all... - Omegatron 16:09, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)
The grammarbot was blocked earlier today by User:CSTAR, presumably because of Poincaré-Birkhoff-Witt theorem. However, this was not an error: the bot changed "x ,x" → to "x,x", which is not worse than the original, although the full manual fix would be "x, x".
I have unblocked it. However, the grammarbot should avoid anything within <pre> ... </pre> and <code> ... </code>, because within these the spacing is significant (ASCII art etc).
-- Curps 19:26, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Well, it was just that I noticed some of the earlier edits at ASCII art did edit within pre and code, so I mentioned that, but presumably you fixed it along the way, after the early runs. Yes, the part in the PBW theorem page was not in any such section (sorry if my phrasing was not clear) and Grammarbot's edit to it was not an error.
Anyways, I did unblock it.
-- Curps 20:58, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hi, I've noticed grammarbot has edited a few articles on my watchlist. This is just to let you know that he (or she?) did very well: no mistakes. SlimVirgin 05:06, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
In mathematics articles, if one writes about an inner product < , >, obviously it would be wrong to change it to <, >. Michael Hardy 00:49, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
As a 15-year-old, although very interested in mathematics, this is not obvious to me in any way whatsoever. I wish I could put <...> on the exclusions list like code tags, but I need to make more changes otherwise the matching on math tags will stop working. I have 15 minutes to program this before school. Please wait. If anybody thinks this is a serious problem, please go to my page to stop the bot. r3m0t 07:18, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
Excellent, my testcase works. Into the main code my code goes! That was fast. :) r3m0t 07:25, Mar 7, 2005 (UTC)
In TeX, one would write about an inner product ⟨ , ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \ ,\ \rangle } or perhaps ⟨ ∙ , ∙ ⟩ {\displaystyle \langle \bullet ,\bullet \rangle } . The point is that there are two blank spaces in which arguments to the function may appear. I think this occurs sufficiently rarely in non-TeX mathematical notation that it's not a major problem, but one can be a bit touchy about such things after seeing some attempts to "fix" punctuation in mathematical notation that did not need fixing. For example, changing [a, b) to [a, b] or to (a, b). Michael Hardy 22:12, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
"I will notice" this thing is not a person, loose the I and stop anthropmophizing(sp?) about your software.--Jirate 16:00, 2005 Mar 5 (UTC)
Why is it called Grammarbot when it checks punctuation, not grammar? --Angr 22:28, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Neither punctuation nor HTML entities have anything to do with grammar. Now if you had made a bot that could fix dangling participles, sentence fragments, or subjacency violations (things like That's the man who I don't know whether took Martha to the dance last month), that would be a Grammarbot! --Angr 14:59, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for correcting a comma, but if you don't mind, could change the bot's comment to the third person, please. I seriously doubt the program is doing all this, and giving that comment, on it's own initiative. Rather, I expect you wrote the program and comment, and commenting from your own viewpoint would express better that you're doing this, with the bot as your tool. That would connect a person to the changes, making them less of an irritation. (I do hope the bot is limited to space-comma after alfanumerical characters, as space-comma after interpunction is usually intentional. Likewise, that it will only drop the space when there's already a space behind the comma.) Aliter 16:49, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Yeah!!! Grammarbot rules!! What a pal. You're just like Bender. You mess things up, but you get 'em right sometimes too, and having bots around adds needed diversity to this human colony of typists. Uris 05:09, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hey, I have no idea how you do these thingies, but I think there's a lot of work to be done on Wikipedia in catching and fixing a very specific type of punctuation mistake -- not including punctuation inside quote marks. For instance, the proper way to write punctuation in quote marks is: "The general is quite naked," he said ... not like this: "The general is quite naked", he said. Is there some way to set up something like your other reports to check for that? I see it a LOT just trolling random pages for copyedits. Katefan0 22:16, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC)
As much as my typographer side hates me for suggesting this, for uniformity, it would be good to change all the correct quote marks to bastardized computer quote marks. i.e. seek out and destroy “ ” ‘ ’ and their numerical equivalents.
You could also generalize the mdash/ndash thing to replace numerical entities with the equivalent (widely supported) named entities.
– flamurai (t) 15:24, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
297 “ 297 ” 288 ‘ 512 ’
That really isn't very many articles. r3m0t 16:05, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
Actually, there are far more with the numbered entities. See Wikipedia talk:Bots#Grammarbot and please continue discussion there. r3m0t 17:22, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
I've fixed these two a lot. the Chicago Manual of Style (14th edition) item 5.62 says "A comma is usually used after such expressions as that is, namely, i.e., and e.g." The reason being, these are almost exclusively used parenthetically; the comma is needed to indicate that.
If my memory of regular (Perl) expressions serves me, I think something like this is in order:
s/(\W)(ie|i\.e|ie\.)/$1i\.e\./g; # Make sure they all have two periods. s/(\W)i\.e\.^\,/$1i\.e\.\,/g; # Make sure they all have the trailing comma.
Here's an idea... Change any external link that links to an internal link (article). Some people may know how to make an external link, but they might make all their links as external links... especially to some that are articles. -- AllyUnion (talk) 20:50, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
sometimes you shouldn't delete the space, but move it after comma, such as here.
The example given above is a good suggestion. hydnjo talk 8 July 2005 21:04 (UTC)
Thank you for your contribution at Pune. Please keep it up!!! - P R A D E E P Somani (talk) Feel free to send me e-mail.
Please take a few moments and fill in the data for your bot on Wikipedia:Bots/Status Thank you Betacommand (talk • contribs • Bot) 19:06, 12 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
As a result of discussion on the village pump and mailing list, bots are now allowed to edit up to 15 times per minute. The following is the new text regarding bot edit rates from Wikipedia:Bot Policy:
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