User:TLAbot

I'm writing this bot to help me in a quest to separate TLAs from specific topics in cases where the desired article isn't completely clear.

Specifications
This bot will be written in PHP, and will run on a personally-owned machine via command-line invocation of the script.

Process
The bot will sift through all articles in Main namespace whose titles are three-letter acronyms with no qualifiers. For example, it would examine PHP, but not PHP (disambiguation). It will use the old Query API (and eventually, the MediaWiki API) to accomplish this by looking for the template   on the page's most recent revision. The bot will only perform edits in one place, on a subpage of this user page, where it will list any TLAs that it finds which do not directly include the aforementioned template. It will also list a count of the articles in Main namespace which link to that article, and possibly some other easily queryable information as well, as the need arises.

Attendedness
After testing confirms that the bot does not run amok across Wikipedia, it will run semi-unattended, i.e., I will manually start it, and it will terminate eventually (after it reaches "ZZZ"), but until it terminates it will run unattended.

Manual usage of results
I will periodically go through the articles that it finds and conduct edits manually, such that most articles with three-letter acronym titles will be disambiguation pages themselves, rather than redirecting to a disambiguation page or being an article about a specific topic with a "see also this disambiguation page" link near the top. These edits will use my personal judgment as to whether to disambiguate the TLA directly, based on the following criteria:
 * Is the current content of the article profoundly associated with the acronym? Most telling is the number of Main namespace pages that link to the article expecting it to directly contain specific content.
 * Is the current content uniquely associated with the acronym? Disambiguation is unnecessary when there's only one topic to disambiguate.

Runtime and server load
Since the subsequent edits will all be fully manual, I plan to run the bot with a fairly slow page fetch rate, perhaps as fast as one every five minutes. At this rate, it will take about two months to sift through the entire list. The projected period of operation is indefinite, i.e., I plan to keep the bot running even after the initial progression through the list has been completed, in order to catch changes that move pages away from disambiguation. I may also eventually expand the scope of the project to include acronyms of length 2 or 4, though the usefulness of the bot is more pronounced at length 3.

Questions?
If you have any questions, feel free to discuss them on the TLAbot talk page or on my own talk page. --Dachannien TalkContrib 08:49, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Permission Request
Bots/Requests_for_approval/TLAbot