Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard

Bots noticeboard

Here we coordinate and discuss Wikipedia issues related to bots and other programs interacting with the MediaWiki software. Bot operators are the main users of this noticeboard, but even if you are not one, your comments will be welcome. Just make sure you are aware about our bot policy and know where to post your issue. Do not post here if you came to discuss non-urgent bot issues, bugs and suggestions for improvement. Do that at the bot operator's talk page discuss urgent/major bot issues. Do that according to instructions at WP:BOTISSUE discuss general questions about the MediaWiki software and syntax. We have the village pump's technical section for that request approval for your new bot. Here is where you should do it request new functionality for bots. Share your ideas at the dedicated page

2020 Census update bot?

The data from the 2020 US Census has been available for more than 3 years now, yet there are thousands of articles about US cities which have summaries of the 2000 census and the 2010 census, but not the 2020 results. This makes those articles appear stale and abandoned. I wrote a Python script to fetch the 2020 census data using the Census Department's API (not web scraping) to write summaries for the Iowa city pages that had not been updated yet with 2020 summaries. I did NOT do this as a bot, I manually edited 894 articles about Iowa cities, and I performed several sanity checks on each article. That took several very tedious days. I'm not going to do that manually for the other 49 states! The 2010 summaries were apparently produced by a bot which is no longer active. Is there anyone planning on making a bot to do the 2020 updates? If not, would someone be willing to work with me on making a bot to do the updates? I don't have the nerve to try to do it by myself. PopePompus (talk) 03:46, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, where are these census values included? Are they used as a parameter in an infobox or other template, or directly as prose on the page? Primefac (talk) 10:34, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Directly as prose on the page. I did not remove or change any 2020 census summaries that had already been made (except in one case where the existing summary was extremely brief). On all the pages that I did update, there were already prose summaries of the 2000 and 2010 census results. I merely added another summary in the same style as the existing summaries on the page. Here's an example: West Burlington, Iowa. One of the sanity checks I did was to check that my calculated population density matched the one in the infobox. In a few instances I found significant disagreement. In all those cases I found that the area listed in the infobox, and used for the density calculations, did not agree with the actual value found in the reference cited in the infobox. So in those cases I corrected the area and density values in the infobox. Many more infoboxes had density values that differed slightly (by <1%) from the value I had calculated (the West Burlington infobox is one such case); I left those alone. I suspect those small disagreements arose because the reference for area cited in the infoboxes, which was the same reference I used, listed the area both in square meters and in square miles. The square miles value did not have enough decimal digits to exactly represent the square meters value. So you get slightly different population density results depending upon which value you chose to use. PopePompus (talk) 23:09, 23 October 2024 (UTC)