Introduction: GPP - The Gracenote Placeholder Project

Aim

Aim of the project is to convert protected placeholder pages by GracenoteBot into create-protected titles. Therefore, the placeholders have to be deleted, and the title is to be protected again. This is a concept how to perform the conversion, elaborated by Chris.

Benefits

There are several big problems arising from the use of placeholders:

  1. Placeholders have no content, hence no language for the {{SongFooter}}.
  2. Many placeholders are songs with wrong names. Although some titles are comprehensible, many are simply absurd, unfortunately.
  3. Because of that, only few placeholder redirects are really useful and desirable, whereas most are nothing but additional work for the admins.
  4. Until they are transformed to redirects, placeholders will be located in the Other Songs section. This doesn't only look quite ugly, it also makes finding "usual" pages more difficult, e. g. those that are really not sorted into albums yet.
  5. Placeholders, no matter if kept or made to redirects, are currently massively "spamming" the Special:PrefixIndex pages, which often makes a profitable use of the alphabetical browsing impossible.
  6. This makes LyricWiki less usable and altogether look poorly maintained for new and unknowing visitors.
For usual users, create-protected pages appear like the usual empty pages, except there's no "Create" button. Adding a section about that to the FAQ would be sensible and should do for most users. If they type in "action=edit" manually, they will get a note that the page is create-protected (and also why). Create-protected titles can still be made to protected redirects afterwards by admins, which is why the create-protected pages are no loss compared to placeholders.

Instead of Special:PrefixIndex, placeholders will appear on Special:ProtectedTitles, whereas {{gracenote_takedown}} could put the real takedowns into a category. This increases the tidyness through coherent sorting:

Step 1: Get GNB contribs

API request

api.php?action=query&list=usercontribs&ucuser=GracenoteBot&ucnamespace=0&uclimit=5000&ucprop=ids|title|comment&ucdir=newer&ucstart=...

Results

Notes

Filter (cmd)

grep -w placeholder gnb_contribs.xml >> gnb_contribs_filtered_full.xml

Refresh the lists

Step 2: Check

API request

api.php?action=query&prop=info&inprop=protection|revcount|redirect&intoken=delete|protect&pageids=...

Notes

This is one query to determine what to do with the page, but also preparing conversion by already requesting the tokens, just in case they're needed.

Action tree

Is "revcount=2"?
Y: Log as "placeholder", delete and create-protect (page was just 1:created and 2:protected with those 2 revisions)
N: Is the page a redirect now (is "redirectto" set for the page)?
Y: Is protection "edit|sysop|infinity"?
Y: Log as "redirected placeholder", delete and create-protect
N: Log as "unprotected redirect" (requires human revision, maybe is a now wanted redirect)
N: Is protection "edit|sysop|infinity"?
Y: Log as "modified takedown" (requires human revision, conversion insecure and depending on what was changed exactly)
N: Log as "now content page" (hopefully not too many, further actions depend on the result we'll get)

Step 3: Perform and manage

Perform

Delete placeholder

api.php?action=delete&token=...&pageid=...

Create-protect the page

api.php?action=protect&reason=Page+is+on+Gracenote+takedown+list&protections=create=sysop&token=...&pageid=...

Manage (for GNB)

Getting the tokens

api.php?action=query&prop=info&intoken=protect&titles=...

Protect a title

api.php?action=protect&reason=Page+is+on+Gracenote+takedown+list&protections=create=sysop&token=...&title=...

Unprotect a title

api.php?action=protect&reason=Page+is+no+longer+on+Gracenote+takedown+list&protections=create=all&token=...&title=...

Step 4: Tidy up

Essentially, there will be many "Other Songs" sections that contained the placeholder pages.

We need to extract the artists from the log-lists "placeholder" and "redirected placeholder", and clear their lists from redlinks. Some "Other Songs" sections might only contain former placeholders and need to be removed. Additionally, some artist pages might have solely been created to hold the "Other Songs" section (i. e. whilst sorting orphaned pages) and need to be deleted, too.