Wikipedia:AWB/Tasks

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Anachronistic bilateral relations categories for Yugoslavia

There are a large number of bilateral relations pages for successor states of Yugoslavia that are anachronistically placed in a bilateral relations category for Yugoslavia. I ask that all bilateral relations articles and categories related to these countries be purged from bilateral relations categories for Yugoslavia.

• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Croatia
• North Macedonia
• Serbia and Montenegro
  • Montenegro
  • Serbia
    • Kosovo

–LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 13:58, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

It is also possible that there are Yugoslavia categories containing only bilateral relations for successor states, but this is less likely and I haven't checked. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 14:19, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

Can you give an example edit?   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  05:25, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

It might look like . –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 05:39, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

I wasn't immediately able to find an example in the forward direction, but the edit which removes the post-Yugoslavia categories would be similar. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 05:44, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

@Tom.Reding: Is the above enough information on how to implement this? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 08:17, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

I think so. I'll start  working on this soon.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  11:30, 18 May 2026 (UTC)

 Done for <country>–Yugoslavia & Yugoslavia–<country> relations cats.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  17:40, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

 Done. I found 1053 <Yugoslavia descendant> relations cats, and none of them contained any Yugoslavia cats. Perhaps someone fixed them all? I checked about a dozen of these cats randomly and none of them had any recent changes.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  18:39, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

And articles? I spotted Sri Lanka–Yugoslavia relations in Category:Bosnia and Herzegovina–Sri Lanka relations. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 19:49, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Diff of removal for the above category. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 19:50, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

 Done Got curious, did it in 60 articles. The case of Czechoslovakia categories is similar, but apparently there are only a few articles left. Ponor (talk) 01:58, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

That will likely require some page splits, and I have proposed one for Czech Republic–Israel relations. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 03:29, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

I didn't look at articles at first, but then I recursed Category:Bilateral relations of Yugoslavia 4 levels and found 3 more: Seychelles–Yugoslavia relations, Italy–Yugoslavia relations, India–Yugoslavia relations.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  12:57, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

While recursing Category:Bilateral relations of Yugoslavia 4 levels, I found 165 possibly problematic cats, 44 of them recently edited by Place Clichy (example).   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  12:57, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Dear LaundryPizza03, Tom.Reding, Ponor. Since all Yugoslav republics are direct legal successors to Yugoslavia, their categorization reflects historical continuity rather than anachronism. This situation differs significantly from cases like the Soviet Union, where categorizing USSR-Nepal relations under some Armenia-Nepal category would be anachronistic. All past Yugoslav and Czechoslovak republics formally inherit relations, including embassies and staff, from the former state, similar to how Prussia–United States relations were inherited by Germany and are included here under Germany–United States category (focus being here exactly on legal and historical continuity and not on direction of going from smaller to bigger or bigger to smaller state). The Soviet Union example shows that Japan–Soviet Union relations are categorized under Japan–Russia relations because Russia is the sole legal successor (is this not anachronistic?). However, for Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, this applies to all former republics, not just to Czechia or Serbia. I am uncertain how best to present this important legal distinction in our articles and categories, but it seems the current approach overlooks this specific aspect entirely. I welcome any suggestions on this matter.--MirkoS18 (talk) 07:51, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

However, all articles about politics or sports should treat the countries as distinct. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 18:05, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

So, categories in Japan–Soviet Union relations and Prussia–United States relations (for example), are there mistakenly as well if I understood your claim properly?--MirkoS18 (talk) 18:07, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Yes. We should have a {{cat see also}} linking predecessor and successor states. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:30, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

{{Preceding category}} & {{Succeeding category}} would be better imo.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  00:34, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

I apologize for the continued inquiries, but I am uncertain regarding the correct technical approach to take. It appears somewhat confusing to me. Could you kindly provide any example of a good practice to follow?--MirkoS18 (talk) 09:37, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Attach "Preceding category" to a corresponding Yugoslavia bilateral category on Yugoslav successor states, and "Succeeding category" on Yugoslavia categories to a corresponding category for each Yugoslav successor state. You don't have to check if a successor exists, each successor will need a separate {{Succeeding category}}, and some cases for new states will need to be handled manually. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 13:42, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Convert HTML-newlined to semantic list in a specific infobox field

In {{chembox}}, the |OtherNames= field can contain multiple values. Per long-standing documentation, they should therefore be a semantic list via {{ubl}}. However, many instead are written as a single string with embedded <br> or <br/> line-break tags. I'd like a bot run to fix that mess, wrapping the parameter-value with the 'ubl' call and replacing all HTML line-break tags with vertical bars. The value someimes spread into multiple lines of source, but the field is always followed by another parameter or the end-of-template, so it's easy to detect how far to grab for the string to edit. There are about 16,000 files using this template, the vast majority of which have only one such template per page (though a few have more than one), and no other template appears to have the same CamelCase form of that parameter-name. DMacks (talk) 14:54, 4 June 2026 (UTC)

correct invocations of redirected template

There is {{Infobox medical condition}}, which is working fine. At some point, {{Infobox medical condition (new)}} was used for testing and development. Now, (new) is a redirect to the regular template, but hundreds of articles still invoke (new).

Editing articles is difficult enough without discovering and tracing down redirects for different versions of articles, and WP:BRINT advises that In other namespaces, particularly the template and portal namespaces in which subpages are common, any link or transclusion to a former page title that has become a redirect following a page move or merge should be updated to the new title for naming consistency. template redirects shouldn't be kept after page moves for consistency.

Can an AWB task please be built and executed to convert invocations of {{Infobox medical condition (new)}} to {{Infobox medical condition}}? -- mikeblas (talk) 19:23, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

You're looking for WP:AWB/TR. Primefac (talk) 20:18, 20 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. How is consensus established before adding a rule there? The page says consensus is necessary but doesn't say where conversations should be hosted. -- mikeblas (talk) 00:40, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

It doesn't have to be a formal RFC (or even "major" discussion), but if something has been done that indicates that a template should not have an old title (such as your example of removing (new) in the name) then it's not unreasonable to have it be on that page for automatic replacement. There is also a reasonable argument to be made that simply adding a template redirect, and no one objecting is a form of consensus. Primefac (talk) 09:28, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Someone is objecting: me. Seems like a silly argument, anyway, as a redirect can be added without people noticing, even though they'd immediately object if they knew it was added. -- mikeblas (talk) 13:48, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

So if I'm understanding correctly, you're objecting to the fact that no one has gone and done WP:COSMETIC edits on roughly 6,600 pages? These will get done eventually, as each page is touched by an editor with AWB and GenFixes turned on. BAG won't approve a COSMETICBOT, and very few people are willing to click Save on AWB 6,600 times. phuzion (talk) 14:00, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

I think you misunderstood, I was talking about "objecting to adding the redirects to AWB/TR", not creating/using the redirects in the first place. Template redirects exist for a reason and you are unlikely to get consensus to change that status quo. Primefac (talk) 14:07, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Looks like there's already a rule there for this request. Then: why do so many links exist? Is the problem that it is listed twice? -- mikeblas (talk) 01:10, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

The "new" template was created in 2015, but the "old" template wasn't put out-of-use until 2019, so I'm not really surprised that in those four years most (if not all) of the "old" uses got changed to "new" ones before being moved to the base name.

To address something I missed in your first post, I believe you're misinterpreting BRINT; it's "template redirects shouldn't be kept in the template space after page moves for consistency". We use {{ill}} all over the place, and {{infobox officeholder}} used to have a list of the dozens of redirects to it (which no one really minds). Primefac (talk) 09:23, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

These templates and redirects are all in the template space. Every one of them. -- mikeblas (talk) 13:51, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

I'm not talking about something like {{Infobox medical condition (new)}} existing, I'm talking about (for example) Special:Diff/1353141428 where {{tfm}} was replaced by its full name in {{Template for merging}}. Primefac (talk) 14:14, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Remove dates from tables using AWB

When new routes are added to airport destination tables, the starting date for said route is added if it's in the future - eg. [[Sabiha Gökçen International Airport|Istanbul–Sabiha Gökçen]] (begins {{date|2026-6-5}}) or [[Tirana International Airport|Tirana]] (begins 9 June 2026) (both examples taken from Chișinău International Airport). It's a normal maintenance task to remove these dates once they have passed, so you are left with only the piped link, comma (if present) and the following reference (if there is one). I've tried using templates which substitute the text with null after the date has passed, but trying to persuade thousands of airport editors to use them is impossible... so we're left with the mishmash of plain text formats we have today.

Ideally, the removal of these dates could be semi-automated using AWB, but I'm not sure it can be achieved with pure regex, due to the requirement for the dates to be inside the {{Airport destination list}} (or its redirect {{Airport-dest-list}}) templates, and parsing the date to determine if the date is today or older. Given the potential for making a mistake and the associated disruption that would cause, I'm exceedingly hesitant to try and code this by myself without at least some assistance... so does anyone have any ideas? Danners430 _{tweaks made} 13:49, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

@Danners430 If you don't need to be super up-to-date, I'd suggest simple searches like this one or this one (for Jan-May 2026) for the list of pages. I don't know what AWB can do when it comes to date parsing, or if it can target only the two templates for some extra safety. I do know that wAwB can do both (my test run), and if you're open to using it, I can share my project file for an easy start. LMK. Ponor (talk) 15:45, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Aye it looks like that certainly worked - certainly better to run that once for a "clean start" on pages, then run (daily?) frequently to keep up to date :-) Thanks for the pointer! Danners430 _{tweaks made} 16:02, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Looking at it a bit closer, I think date parsing would still be very helpful... running it for previous months is useful, but the vast majority of the daily cleanup is for dates which have only just past. If I look at my watchlist right now, I can see about 4 pages every hour being updated with date changes... it's that manual effort I'm trying to reduce wherever possible Danners430 _{tweaks made} 16:53, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

There are two issues here, really:

1. Finding all the suspect pages using Wikipedia search. Because of the many date formats out there, this is easy with this kind of search, but the regex part gets a bit more complicated if you're targeting dates up to today. I don't see the need for this, and I'd actually want to keep the note for some time past the date (in case they changed their mind).
2. On each page, finding which (begins ...) note to remove; it may be 2 out of 15. This I've done using a little JavaScript function in wAwB. I do not know if AWB lets you use ad-hoc functions like that, I've never been able to get AWB running :(

Ponor (talk) 17:22, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Issue 1 is the easy part - I used the transclusion search for {{Airport destination list}}, focussing on mainspace articles. All airport destination lists use this template as a matter of uniformity :)

Issue 2 I also don’t have an answer for, apologies Danners430 _{tweaks made} 17:30, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

What one can do is blindly look for all the notes for June 2026 (200 pages as of now) and run the script on all of them daily or every few days. On the other hand, Template:Airport destination list is on 5000 pages, running the script with any kind of supervision just to have 5 pages updated every day seems like a lot of (supervised) work. I can teach you how to do this in wAwB, but I won't be around that much to do it myself. LMK. Ponor (talk) 17:36, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

Aye, my interest here is to be able to run it myself - it’ll be a lot more than 5 a day, sometimes it’s over 30 on my watchlist! Danners430 _{tweaks made} 17:42, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

• Given that this is an ongoing maintenance task, I'm wondering whether this shouldn't go to WP:BOTREQ instead? VanIsaac, GHTV ^contr_about 23:12, 22 June 2026 (UTC)

  It’s a good candidate for sure… never really thought of that, I’ll maybe draft something up later Danners430 _{tweaks made} 05:44, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Add value to template EscROTW

{{EscRotW}} had been updated to include a new parameter for the flag that is displayed, as well as to which section of the Rest of the World in the Eurovision Song Contest article the link leads to. Eurovision Song Contests 2023–2025 used the blue flag, whilst the 2026 contest used the purple one, which is expected to continue in the future. I asked the community for somebody to run a bot already, but there has been no response. I'd like to request that all instances of {{EscRotW}} are replaced with:

• {{EscRotW|year=2023}} in the articles in the category Countries in the Eurovision Song Contest 2023
• {{EscRotW|year=2024}} for Countries in the Eurovision Song Contest 2024
• {{EscRotW|year=2025}} for Countries in the Eurovision Song Contest 2025
• {{EscRotW|year=2026}} for Countries in the Eurovision Song Contest 2026.

— IмSтevan ^talk 15:23, 24 June 2026 (UTC)

 Done (soon) Ponor (talk) 16:20, 24 June 2026 (UTC)