Gebroeker:LinkFA-Bot

Wikipedia-Bot

This user ist a proposed bot and is run by its owner Guandalug. The Bot is running semi-automatically and is watched by its owner during work. The Bot gets to run infrequently, whenever Guandalug has the time to watch over it. Check this bot's work. Contact the owner in case of errors. (Link to the talkpage on de:WP) Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.

About the Bot

The LinkFA - Bot has been written in PHP and tries to keep the usage of {{Link FA|xx}} current.

If it's working, it has the following phases:

Init phase

Gather all articles that use the template here in the wikipedia, and all featured - templates and categories from foreign wikipedias. Gather the articles that are thus marked as featured elsewhere.

Check

For each article that holds a 'Link FA' template, check whether all Interwiki - linked articles are marked as "featured" (by checking whether they are known to us from the Init phase) and set / remove the respective {{Link FA|xx}} template (all in one go per article).

Search

For each remote article we gathered during init that we did not yet encounter as an "featured interwiki link", try and check whether the remote article links to an article here. If so, that must be an unmarked and up to now unchecked article locally, so call a 'check on that article.

A more detailed description of the bot work can be found here (oder hier auf Deutsch).

Requirements for the bot to work properly

• The excellency -templates and -categories of foreign wikis must be listed as links either in Templates or Categories, or the bot won't accept foreign "featured" marks and dump the markup template.
• The page to be updated locally must not be edit-protected with level 'sysop'.

Frequently asked questions

Why did the bot delete the 'Link FA' markup on Article XY?

There's a couple of possible answers to that:

• The article at the other end of the interwiki link is not a featured article, but a featured portal or a featured list - those don't get marked with the 'Link FA' template, or the article isn't even "featured" but just good.
• At the time the bot checked the list of 'featured articles' on the other wiki, that article wasn't marked (for whatever reason)
• The bot didn't know/recognize the "Featured" template used in the remote article

Article XYZ is featured for a while now, why didn't the bot add the markup yet?

New markups (introducing {{Link FA|..}} to pages that don't have one) only happens when the page in question is linked from a 'featured' article on a remote wiki and already links back to that article. Building up the interwiki link net is something this bot does not participate in.