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Fix and upgrade RetractionBot
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Description

RetractionBot is a tool I (@Samwalton9) wrote earlier in the year. It looks for retracted publications and flags citations on Wikipedia with the {{Retracted}} template, encouraging editors to review and either confirm or remove the citation.

The bot ran for a day then hit some issues and had to be paused. It would be great to fix the outstanding issues, get the bot running again, and work on some improvements, such as expanding the data sources. If you'd like to get the bot running on another Wiki that's also something we could work on!

If you want to work on the code the only requirement would be familiarity with Python! No technical knowledge necessary for expanding to other Wikis.

Code repository: https://github.com/Samwalton9/RetractionBot
Context for bot issue(s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:RetractionBot#How_to_avoid_an_edit_warring_bot

Event Timeline

Samwalton9-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)
Samwalton9-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)

Potential tasks:

  • Ensure the bot doesn't edit war
  • Stop Cochrane Systematic Reviews from being considered withdrawn
  • Add PubMed and other data sources
  • Expand to other language Wikis
  • Better login than username/password
  • Write tests?

If anyone's interested in working on this, I'm currently at Table 8 in Hacking Space 1!

Very little interest in this today so probably won't continue working on it during this hackathon.