Is there someone operating a CatBot for deleting
things like [[Category:FHM 100 Sexiest Women List]]
from all the entries
It occurs to me (in a fairly inconsequential and rambling way) that
this need is due to the software's use of inline markup for what
should be out-of-line metadata - i.e. we can't have an easy database
removal of a category, because the article end of the equation is
stored in the text of the article, rather than (as well as?)
separately in the DB.
It's kind of obvious, but it's a disadvantage that more and more
features are encountering (interlanguage links and some template
maintenance tasks are similarly hard to automate, for the same
reason).
I know there's been an absolute ton of discussion about metadata,
key-value pairs, etc, but I wonder if it's not worth going for a
fairly simple system of having a "metadata" text-box which is actually
a magic interface to special fields in the DB - the user edits special
markup like they do now (for translations, categories, etc), but it's
parsed at save and not actually stored as text (except perhaps in some
kind of cache if necessary). That way, a lot of 'bots' could be
integrated and operate at the DB level, rather than sitting outside
the software and pretending to be users.
But I guess that's all just a pipe-dream, and there are plenty of
things it doesn't solve. Maybe it would be better just to produce a
special bot-friendly interface, instead (limitable to registered bot
accounts); one that doesn't have to wait for and parse HTML responses,
thus slowing down both it and the website...
I'll shut up now.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]