Skanwiki/Skanbot

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Abstract

This document describes the instructions for a bot that is proposed to be working across the four Scandinavian wikipedias as well as meta. Its main task will be to copy featured article templates between all four wikipedias as well as to meta. In practice, it will first work on the two Norwegian wikipedias located at no.wikipedia.org and nn.wikipedia.org.

Background

The language situation of Norway

The two Norwegian wikipedias are both wikipedias for the Norwegian language. Norwegian language has two official written standards, and one commonly used non-official standard, nynorsk, bokmål and riksmål, respectively.

Put briefly, Bokmål and Riksmål has a common history in being more or less direct descendants of the Danish written language (due to our common history with Denmark), whereas Nynorsk is a constructed language based on many spoken dialects of Norwegians. The former languages has a user base of up to 90% of the Norwegian population, whereas Nynorsk is written by a minority of 10-15%.

The two written standards are mutually intelligible for most educated Norwegians, but differ significantly in syntax, morphology, and semantics. The difference is vastly greater than e.g. the difference between British English and American English. A closer analogy that may be helpful for English-speakers to help understand the situation is the relationship between English and (Lowland) Scots.

It should also be mentioned that together with the Danish and Swedish written languages, the four standards form a group of languages that are used for the Scandinavian language, which may be looked upon linguistically as a heterogenous collection of dialects scattered along a multidimensional spectrum.

Wikipedia in Norway

NO, established already in 2001, with an article count currently at 21.000+, has always allowed all three standards. However, NO has become the de facto bokmål/riksmål wikipedia, with very few nynorsk articles.

NN started on 31 July 2004 and only allows nynorsk. It has since proved its viability by reaching an article count of 4300 in about 7 months. Most active Nynorsk-using wikipedians seem to contribute here rather than at NO.

Scandinavian, and especially Norwegian, inter-Wikipedia issues

As one of several means to encourage activity (both by readers and contributors) on both the Norwegian wikipedias, and indeed on all Scandinavian wikipedias, NN and NO has decided to display the featured articles of the week of each others' Wikipedias on the front pages, as well as the daily featured article from the Danish Wikipedia (DA) and the (sporadically updated) featured article from the Swedish Wikipedia (SV).

The featured article of all these wikipedias generally contain the first few paragraphs of a particularly good article, together with a photo. This excerpt is then placed in a template, and the template is called on the front page.

However, due to limitations in the software, MediaWiki does not allow for templates to be used between different implementations of the software. I.e. one cannot simply link to anothers template by writing e.g. {{:no:Today's featured article}}, in the same way that one can link to another wikipedia's article by writing [[:no:Today's featured article]].

This has led the users at NO and NN to manually copy each others' templates, as well as the templates from DA and SV into their respective places on the local wikipedias. This may become a significant work load, and also allows for mistakes to be made.

The bot is also to copy the templates for each of the featured article into the corresponding templates here on meta.wikimedia.org (META), so that they can all be displayed on the Scandinavian meta pages (Skanwiki) located at Skanwiki.

I hereby propose the development of a bot that can do this work.

Instructions for the bot (Skanbot)

Work tasks

The bot (Skanbot), will have to do the following tasks:

1. Copy the contents of NN's current weekly featured article template to its corresponding template on NO
   1. Change local NN links to display correctly on NO by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:nn:Link|Link]]
2. Copy the contents of NN's NEXT WEEK'S weekly featured article template to its corresponding template on NO
   1. Change local NN links to display correctly on NO by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:nn:Link|Link]]
3. Copy the contents of NO's current weekly featured article template to its corresponding template on NN
   1. Change local NO links to display correctly on NN by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:no:Link|Link]]
4. Copy the contents of NO's NEXT WEEK'S weekly featured article template to its corresponding template on NN
   1. Change local NO links to display correctly on NN by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:no:Link|Link]]
5. Copy the contents of DA's current daily featured article template to its corresponding template on NO
   1. Change local DA links to display correctly on NO by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:da:Link|Link]]
6. Copy the contents of DA's NEXT DAY'S daily featured article template to its corresponding template on NO
   1. Change local DA links to display correctly on NO by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:da:Link|Link]]
7. Copy the contents of DA's current daily featured article template to its corresponding template on NN
   1. Change local DA links to display correctly on NN by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:da:Link|Link]]
8. Copy the contents of DA's NEXT DAY'S daily featured article template to its corresponding template on NN
   1. Change local DA links to display correctly on NN by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:da:Link|Link]]
9. Copy the contents of SV's sporadically updated featured article to its corresponding template NO
   1. Change local SV links to display correctly on NO by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:sv:Link|Link]]
10. Copy the contents of SV's sporadically updated featured article to its corresponding template NN
    1. Change local SV links to display correctly on NN by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:sv:Link|Link]]
11. Copy the contents of NN's current weekly featured article template and to its corresponding template on META
    1. Change local NN links to display correctly on META by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:nn:Link|Link]]
12. Copy the contents of NN's NEXT WEEK'S weekly featured article template and to its corresponding template on META
    1. Change local NN links to display correctly on META by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:nn:Link|Link]]
13. Copy the contents of NO's current weekly featured article template to its corresponding template on META
    1. Change local NO links to display correctly on META by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:no:Link|Link]]
14. Copy the contents of NO's NEXT WEEK'S weekly featured article template to its corresponding template on META
    1. Change local NO links to display correctly on META by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:no:Link|Link]]
15. Copy the contents of DA's current daily featured article template to its corresponding template on META
    1. Change local DA links to display correctly on META by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:da:Link|Link]]
16. Copy the contents of DA's NEXT DAY'S daily featured article template to its corresponding template on META
    1. Change local DA links to display correctly on META by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:da:Link|Link]]
17. Copy the contents of SV's sporadically updated featured article to its corresponding template META
    1. Change local SV links to display correctly on META by doing the following: [[Link]] --> [[:sv:Link|Link]]

Location of templates

NOTE: All below locations are spelt out as they should be written locally on the respective wikipedia. The actual link given afterwards is to the actual template but spelt out as it needs to be on meta with the preceeding language code. The {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} variable unfortunately only gives the English name on :meta, so the links pointing to the Danish templates won't work locally here on meta.

NO

Local feature article

• The template of the featured Bokmål article of the CURRENT week is locally located on [[Wikipedia:Ukens artikkel/Uke {{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}]] --> no:Wikipedia:Ukens artikkel/Uke 51, 2024

Guest feature articles

• The template of the featured Nynorsk article of the CURRENT week is locally located on [[Wikipedia:Ukens artikkel på nynorsk/Uke {{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}]] --> no:Wikipedia:Ukens artikkel på nynorsk/Uke 51, 2024
• The template of the CURRENT today's featured Danish article is locally located on [[Wikipedia:Dagens danske artikkel/{{CURRENTDAY}}. {{CURRENTMONTH}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}
• The template of the Swedish featured article is at any given time located on [[Wikipedia:Utvalgt svensk artikkel/Gjeldende]] --> no:Wikipedia:Utvalgt svensk artikkel/Gjeldende.

NN

Local feature article

• The template of the featured Nynorsk article of the CURRENT week is locally located on [[Wikipedia:Vekas artikkel/Veke {{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}]] --> nn:Wikipedia:Vekas artikkel/Veke 51, 2024

Guest feature articles

• The template of the featured Bokmål article of the CURRENT week is locally located on [[Wikipedia:Vekas bokmålsartikkel/Veke {{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}]] --> nn:Wikipedia:Vekas bokmålsartikkel/Veke 51, 2024
• The template of the CURRENT today's featured Danish article is locally located on [[Wikipedia:Dagens danske artikkel/{{CURRENTDAY}}. {{CURRENTMONTH}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}]]
• The template of the Swedish featured article is at any given time located on [[Wikipedia:Utvald svensk artikkel/Gjeldande]] --> nn:Wikipedia:Utvald svensk artikkel/Gjeldande.

DA

Local feature article

• The template of the CURRENT daily featured Danish article is locally located on [[Wikipedia:Dagens artikel/{{CURRENTDAY}}. {{CURRENTMONTH}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}]]

SV

Local featured article

• The template of the (sporadically updated) featured Swedish article is locally located on [[Mall:Utvalda]] --> sv:Mall:Utvalda

Meta

• The template of the featured Bokmål article of the CURRENT week is locally located on [[:Skanwiki/Ukens artikkel/Uke {{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}]] --> Skanwiki/Ukens artikkel/Uke 51, 2024
• The template of the featured Nynorsk article of the CURRENT week is locally located on [[:Skanwiki/Vekas artikkel/Veke {{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}]] --> Skanwiki/Vekas artikkel/Veke 51, 2024
• The template of the featured Danish article is locally located on [[:Skanwiki/Ugens artikel/Uge {{CURRENTWEEK}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}]] --> Skanwiki/Ugens artikel/Uge 51, 2024
• The template of the (sporadically updated) featured Swedish article is locally located on [[:Skanwiki/Utvald artikel]] --> Skanwiki/Utvald artikel/Utvalda

Frequency of updates

The bot does obviously not need to do this work all that frequently. I suggest that the bot does the tasks described above once every 24 hours, at a set time. This could be e.g. two hours before midnight UTC in order to include the most up to date article before publication at midnight, as the case may be.

Future tasks

This document has not touched on the issue of images in the articles. The creator of the featured article template should be encouraged to use commons as far as possible so as to encourage its use, as well as to reduce the need to download/upload local images. Also, the name of the namespaces should follow the English standard (i.e. image: not fil:, bilde:, bild: or billed:), which is compatible with all MediaWiki-implementations.

I suggest that the bot is built with a room for doing the same tasks for SV and DA should these communities wish to follow the examples of NO and NN.

BjarteSorensen 12:36, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)