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:
- Placeholders have no content, hence no language for the {{SongFooter}}.
- Many placeholders are songs with wrong names. Although some titles are comprehensible, many are simply absurd, unfortunately.
- Because of that, only few placeholder redirects are really useful and desirable, whereas most are nothing but additional work for the admins.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- Content pages and takedowns are visible at
Special:PrefixIndex and on the artist page.
- Real takedowns are visible in their own category.
- Placeholders (and their redirects) are visible at
Special:ProtectedTitles.
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
- As the contribution sort direction was "Older > Newer", lastest contributions are at the end
- Latest "ucstart" timestamp with less than 5000 results:
2011-03-16T00:18:51Z
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.