The Earwig

For about the last three days, lowercase sigmabot III has only been archiving the Administrator's noticeboards and nothing else. Somebody mentioned that you gave it a good kick the last time it went on the fritz, so I will go ahead and notify you. Safiel (talk) 16:37, 29 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the notice. I've kicked it again and added a workaround in case this issue happens again. — The Earwig (talk) 04:29, 30 April 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi, hope you're well. I think the bot is down again. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:36, 12 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, AirshipJungleman29. Different issue from last time. I think I've fixed it. — The Earwig (talk) 03:01, 13 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

News and updates for administrators from the past month (April 2024).

  Guideline and policy news

• Phase I of the 2024 requests for adminship review has concluded. Several proposals have passed outright and will proceed to implementation, including creating a discussion-only period (3b) and administrator elections (13) on a trial basis. Other successful proposals, such as creating a reminder of civility norms (2), will undergo further refinement in Phase II. Proposals passed on a trial basis will be discussed in Phase II, after their trials conclude. Further details on specific proposals can be found in the full report.

  Technical news

• Partial action blocks are now in effect on the English Wikipedia. This means that administrators have the ability to restrict users from certain actions, including uploading files, moving pages and files, creating new pages, and sending thanks. T280531

  Arbitration

• The arbitration case Conflict of interest management has been closed.

  Miscellaneous

• This may be a good time to reach out to potential nominees to ask if they would consider an RfA.
• A New Pages Patrol backlog drive is happening in May 2024 to reduce the number of unreviewed articles in the new pages feed. Currently, there is a backlog of over 15,000 articles awaiting review. Sign up here to participate!
• Voting for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) election is open until 9 May 2024. Read the voting page on Meta-Wiki and cast your vote here!

Hi, @The Earwig! You seem to be the most active operator for one of the Category:WikiProject tagging bots so I hope this isn't a bother. I'm overseeing the newly created WP:WikiProject AfroCreatives now and would like to disseminate {{WikiProject AfroCreatives}} through our targeted articles in the AfroCreatives categories with all subcategories included. We are willing to make use of auto assessment and to inherit it from existing WP banners too. The template already accommodates this. I would very much appreciate your help. Assem Khidhr (talk) 06:12, 5 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi Assem Khidhr, my apologies for not replying to this sooner, but as you probably guessed by my lack of response I don't have the free time to work on this task at the moment. Sorry. — The Earwig (talk) 04:23, 7 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Best of luck, @The Earwig. I was since granted AWB authorization and managed to add those banners myself. Thanks! Assem Khidhr (talk) 15:51, 7 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi,

(Sorry if this is the wrong forum for asking, but if so, perhaps you could point me in the right direction?)

I use the Copyvio Detector (great tool, BTW!) in checking new AfC drafts, at least a dozen times most days. I sometimes get an error message saying that the detector has exceeded its maximum allowed Google searches. This issue has always been there, occasionally, but in the last week or two it has occurred daily. When I start reviewing, around 6am or so UK time, the first few reviews always hit this problem. Then, maybe 8am (?) the daily quota probably gets reset, or something else happens, because from then onwards everything is fine until the next morning.

So I was thinking, I don't suppose there's much we can do to increase the quota (?), but would it be possible to add another search engine as a fallback option? Either so that when the user gets that error message, they could manually tick a box to use Bing (say) instead; or maybe the Detector could automatically switch to using the alternative if Google has failed.

I realise this may not be possible, either for technical or policy reasons, but thought I'd ask at least. Cheers, -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 09:35, 8 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi DoubleGrazing, using Bing or some other engine as a fallback is definitely something we’ve discussed—I hadn’t realized the issue had gotten this bad recently. The main issue here is these services usually cost money, and while the WMF pays for our Google access right now, I don’t know if I will be able to ask for access to additional search engines. First, I can take a deeper look into whether anyone is overusing their share of the tool’s resources; we might need to block/limit them. (Our plan with Google allows about 1500 articles to be checked per day.) — The Earwig _alt (talk) 16:11, 8 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

Okay, thanks for shedding some more light on this; needless to say, I knew nothing about how these things work.

I guess we at AfC are taking up quite a chunk of that quota, given that we see what are by definition new drafts usually by new users. I for one run the check probably at least on ⅓ of the drafts I review (and if you think that makes me an overuser, feel absolutely free to point this out, of course!). Even at NPP we deal with relatively more experienced users, so there's that much less of a need to check for CV.

It may be that I see the problem worse than some others, mind, because of my weird early-morning AfC habit, combined with the time zone I'm in. -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 17:05, 8 May 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hello Ben, sorry to bother you so early and on a Sunday. The Copyvio detector seems unable to perform any comparisons at the moment. It sits and spins for three minutes before timing out ("The URL https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz55y6k0p5go timed out before any data could be retrieved.") Any assistance appreciated, as we have a lot of reports at CopyPatrol, a lot more than usual, and we will not be able to assess them without this tool. Thank you! — Diannaa (talk) 11:48, 2 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Update: It seems to be functioning normally now. Thank you! — Diannaa (talk) 14:08, 2 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

@The Earwig: It's down again as of 6 June 2024. It takes a long time to reach and then after entering the page title and clicking submit in runs after several minutes with 0 errors. I've tried this with other articles, that got higher vilolations before. Thanks for any help you can provide. Greg Henderson (talk)09:06, 2 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Today, getting the error message: "An error occurred while using the search engine (Google Error: HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests). Note: there is a daily limit on the number of search queries the tool is allowed to make. You may repeat the check without using the search engine." Greg Henderson (talk) 23:14, 7 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

(talk page watcher) @Greghenderson2006: This happens when we've reached our daily quota with Google. Unfortunately, the copyvio detector can only handle up to around 1,250 a day. You'll need to try again after a few hours or so. In the meantime, you can try using the copyvio detector without search engine checks, which will still work. Chlod (say hi!) 01:07, 8 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

News and updates for administrators from the past month (May 2024).

  Guideline and policy news

• Phase II of the 2024 RfA review has commenced to improve and refine the proposals passed in Phase I.

  Technical news

• The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, will now correctly delete pages which were moved to another title. T43351

  Arbitration

• The arbitration case Venezuelan politics has been closed.
• The Committee is seeking volunteers for various roles, including access to the conflict of interest VRT queue.

  Miscellaneous

• WikiProject Reliability's unsourced statements drive is happening in June 2024 to replace {{citation needed}} tags with references! Sign up here to participate!

Hello, The Earwig,

I have a question about this editing tool. It seemed like I could run this 20 or more times before I got a notice that I had reached my daily limit. But now, I receive a notice if I just run it a few times. Has this limit been decreased for some reason? I use this tool quite a lot while patrolling drafts and CSD categories so it's sometimes difficult to remember to go back to reexamine some pages the next day when I have reached my daily limit for the current day. Thanks for any insight you can provide. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:21, 8 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi Liz. Rest assured this isn't related to your own usage of the tool. The daily limit is shared by all users, and allows for about 1000–2000 pages to be checked per day, so even if you're checking a few dozen, that's not a major contributor to the limit getting reached. We've been noticing this issue more frequently recently (see a few threads above) and we're doing some work to restrict other users of the tool who are actually overusing their share of its resources. I'm hoping to have things back to normal soon. — The Earwig (talk) 04:23, 11 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hello again Ben! I am having issues with the Copyvio detector, finding it almost impossible to get it to generate a report. "The URL http://weaponsystems.net/weaponsystem/CC02%20-%20PTZ89.html timed out before any data could be retrieved" for example. Frequently it goes down completely as well. Any assistance appreciated. Thanks, — Diannaa (talk) 11:00, 13 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, there aren't any quick fixes for this. I am working on it. — The Earwig (talk) 16:06, 13 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Actually, I’ve found a partial fix to improve performance. Let’s see if it helps. — The Earwig _alt (talk) 17:19, 13 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

It's much better, thanks! Fixing copyvio is tedious enough lol. — Diannaa (talk) 23:16, 13 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hi Ben,

I've started using the Arc browser, for some reason whenever I try and access Copyvios on it, I get an Internal Server Error. Trying the same URL in Edge works fine. Not sure where the bug is there, but hopefully you can find it.

Also, I see above there still seems to be issues regarding usage, did you need me to tone RichBot down a bit? - Rich^T|C|E-Mail 17:10, 28 June 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hey Rich, sorry I took a bit to reply. This is my first time hearing about Arc and I don't really feel like creating an account to test, so I can't confirm on my end. Are you sure it's an Internal Server Error or may it be a 403 Forbidden? (We may have inadvertently blocked its user agent as a crawler, which would give a 403, but I don't see anything in our block list that looks like it or Chrome [except Linux], so I don't know.) This is pretty strange.

Regarding bot usage, there are two main issues the tool's had lately: general downtime and exhausting our Google credits. I've improved the tool's performance a bit so the former is not a major issue now, but we are still frequently exhausting our daily Google quota. I've checked RichBot's usage and recently it's been consuming around 10-20% of our total Google credits. That's not too excessive, but if you could find a way to tone it down a bit compromising its usefulness, it would be appreciated. — The Earwig (talk) 08:10, 1 July 2024 (UTC)Reply