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Scope which extensions/settings/bots affect how change logs are displayed
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Description

Scope which extensions/settings/bots affect how change logs are displayed, so that we can decide what to create more tickets to investigate further

Acceptance criteria

  • a list of extensions/settings/bots that affect how the watchlist logs are displayed
  • an estimate of how widely they are used

This will lead to tickets in the future to help us with:

  • consideration of any breaking changes that we could make, or things that are dependent on the current watchlist format
  • considerations of improved UX that are implied by these things

Checklist

  • Investigate various extensions/settings (except for the grouping setting as that's in another ticket)
  • "DragNDrop" may create vague edit summaries, may be worth investigating
  • Inform the community of changes and how to contact us for help if they need it.
  • Consider impacts our changes could have - e.g. are we likely to make a breaking change for a bot

Details

Other Assignee
Danny_Benjafield_WMDE

Event Timeline

SuzanneWood-WMDE renamed this task from Investigate extentions/settings which affect how change logs are displayed to Investigate extensions/settings/bots which affect how change logs are displayed.Mar 12 2025, 1:50 PM
SuzanneWood-WMDE renamed this task from Investigate extensions/settings/bots which affect how change logs are displayed to Scope which extensions/settings/bots affect how change logs are displayed.Mar 12 2025, 2:00 PM
SuzanneWood-WMDE updated the task description. (Show Details)

tags - on Wikidata, this page lists information regarding the type of automatic edit summary and where/what the source is, shows many Bots.
Do these bot identifiers appear on Wikipedia watchists?

image.png (73×1 px, 39 KB)
Ingenious bot will repeat information, but only in english in its edit summary.

Drag n Drop works fine on Catalan (where we have the labels switched on as a pilot wiki)

image.png (252×778 px, 88 KB)

In Ukrainian wiki, the EBOT works fine

image.png (237×974 px, 128 KB)

In Ukranian (a pilot wiki) textworkerbot works correctly

image.png (237×974 px, 147 KB)

With regards to T388685:

  • All Bots which would change the auto edit summary for wikidata changes are bots which edit WIkidata, therefore they are designed to have links with resolved labels, so bot edit summaries should not cause problems for this change
  • We could not find and Bots which scrape the output of the recent changes page, since there's no central source to find them. But it seems unlikely that any would be disrupted as bots should:
    • Use the API rather than HTML page
    • Search for classnames if they must select a link
    • Can look for href rather than text

Nonetheless, there are thousands of bots and gadgets, so some which we cannot check might search HTML for the text Property: or the regex of a Property Id.

We will announce the possibility of this change breaking bots when we announce general rollout, and offer support for owners who think their bot will be broken, to refactor their code into a more sustainable option.

I will write a summary for @Danny_Benjafield_WMDE to announce alongside some generic troubleshooting advice, and then we will hold a Bot/Gadget troubleshooting office hour in the week commencing 21st July '25

Summary has been written and annoucned by Danny, all further comms work is located in the following ticket: T399465. This ticket remains open for supporting Bot owners in making necessary changes, as and when they require help

No users reported problems with their Bots, no one came to the Bot troubleshooting, so we can now close this ticket. If users report issues through other media, we will open new subtasks to tackle.