User talk:Wpbot

All hail our new robot overlords! human  16:31, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Should it ignore ones that are enclosed in "ref" tags? Hmm, maybe not... human  16:43, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Oy, I suppose it could..... 16:47, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Also... is there any way you could get it to list what the link is in a given article? human  16:56, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Your lucky I am a genius. 17:00, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * That depends on what you mean by "lucky"... I now have to continue my jihad against these links... human  18:28, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Hey, I just line 'em up.... 18:33, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Just out of curiosity... why is this being done again? Other than an exercise of robotic power, I mean. Uchiha KATON! 18:41, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Essentially because times have shifted as far as our view of wp links I suppose. There was a time when they were used quiet vigorously and frequently by users. Since then a lot of people have come to feel that many of these wp links should be converted to RW articles. I am neutral on the whole thing and merely provide the canvas on which to explore options. 18:44, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * When you say "canvas", you mean "sculpture", don't you?  DogP  20:02, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * I see an obvious problem here. We have one user who hates WP links and another user who hates red links. The absence of a WP link almost necessitates a red link, at least until the article is written - and realistically, some articles will never be written. What will happen when these two forces of enthusiasm collide? -- AKjeldsen Cum dissensie 18:54, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Everyone else gets free entertainment. Jellyfish! 18:56, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * The answer to that question lies in the asking of another question.............what happens when an unmovable object is hit with an unstoppable force? 18:56, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * A Kierkegaardian paradox arises, that's what happens.
 * Anyway, returning to the discussion in question - taking Magritte here as an example, we now have an article of three sentences instead of a link to a pretty good WP article. Barring the unexpected appearance of any art historians among us, I doubt our article on Magritte will ever anywhere near as good as the one on WP, and it's not really on mission anyway. Realistically, people who want to know something about Magritte will just go to WP in any case, so why not make things easy for our customers and give them a direct link? -- AKjeldsen Cum dissensie 19:15, 14 May 2008 (EDT) Edit: Article deleted, and so redlink deleted Researcher (talk) 16:29, 21 December 2009 (UTC) 
 * Anders, Anders, Anders, are we back to this discussion again? (I knew we would be).  One thing is that the wp links make building the wiki harder, since "wanted pages" doesn't get populated.  Another is, making it easy for people to leave your website is poor design.  Anyway, people might want to know what we have to say about Magritte, even if it's weird so far.  They may also want to see a picture of my garage door.  By the way, I also added an auto-wp link to template:sci-outline, so there :P  PS - "customers?"  If we define customer as what it means (where the revenooz come from), we are our own customers!  Trouble is, we could add a wp: link to a zillion places, since we often discuss technical topics or obscure people (us), but it wouldn't make RW "better". human  19:34, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * It's not a question of "leaving" the website - don't most browsers use tapped browsing these days, anyway? - but of providing the customer/user/punter/whatever with easy and straightforward access to information. That's what I would consider good wesite design. -- AKjeldsen Cum dissensie 19:49, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Aren't we sacrificing usability for principle here?
I've never had a problem with seamless links to Wikipedia. And I don't find myself completely convinced -- replacing a Wikipedia link with a redlink actually removes information from easy access on the assumption that it will be replaced, which I think is a Bad Thing, primarily because we're a small operation and we can't count on the redlink being filled quickly. I'd like to offer a sacrifice to whatever codemonkeys we have floating around here -- catalog Wikipedia links under a page like the Wanted page with the understanding that they should be either converted to external links or turned into internal articles. It's ugly, but it at least ensures that the problem is not insurmountable. EVDebs 19:40, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * The trouble with inline links to wp is they hide that we might/should/do have an article on something. I have no problem with well crafted EL sections including them if they seem necessary.  By the weay, how hard do you think it is, exactly, for someone to go to wikipedia and look something up if we don't have the link?  As far as the redlinks, I think we should be judicious.  EG, I simply unlinked John Major, thinking we probably won't write about him.  If we did write one, someone might find the unlinked name and link it.  If they see it's blue, though, they might think it already links to our article. human  19:46, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

One thing I hope we can agree on
There are many links to wp articles when we do have an article on that topic. Those atleast should be changed...right? 20:26, 14 May 2008 (EDT)
 * Absolutely. human  20:53, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Cycling
How often does this bot run and rewrite the list it makes? Daily would be nice, weekly would be tolerable... human  14:50, 16 May 2008 (EDT)
 * I actually didn't set it to run again, I suppose I should.... 22:14, 5 June 2008 (EDT)
 * Okay I set it in cron jobs to run every night, but I throttled its edit rate back, so we shall see how things go. 23:46, 5 June 2008 (EDT)
 * Cool, thanks. What is this "night" thing you speak of?  "When human edits"?  Haha.  ħ uman  01:23, 6 June 2008 (EDT)
 * I was using dpl to create an index of the main namespace articles that needed to be done manually which is why I hadn't set up the bots to run in a cron job. But I finally got around to creating a bot to do this automagically so I will set everything to run daily. 01:26, 6 June 2008 (EDT)
 * Captain, the ship appears to have crashed upon ye shoals. List now = null set... and I know I didn't strip it that well!  ħ uman  01:29, 6 June 2008 (EDT)
 * Yea the bot has to strip the list before it can write to it again, it will start running in like 2 minutes and in a few hours it should be up to date. 01:37, 6 June 2008 (EDT)
 * Ah, ok. Do you know why sometimes there is a break, and it starts at 1 again?  Usually leaving some apocryphal links that are unidentifiable?  ħ uman  01:51, 6 June 2008 (EDT)
 * yes, cause I didn't add an i at the end of one of the search strings. I think it should be fixed now. 01:52, 6 June 2008 (EDT)
 * Ouch, it just "updated" and left "no" data for me to scrounge....  ħ uman  01:51, 12 June 2008 (EDT)