Full-date unlinking bot

The bot has completed its operations.

• What on earth are the codes in your edit summaries?
• Initial proposal (and poll)
• Bot request for approval
• ArbCom approval
• Bot code

Timeline

• May 28, 2009: Full-date unlinking bot first proposed.
• June 22, 2009: Request for comment began.
• July 8, 2009: Proposal to create a bot approved.
• July 9, 2009: Bot account created; request for exception proposals began.
• August 9, 2009: Exception list finalized
• August 23, 2009: First version of bot code published for scrutiny by the community. Full-date unlinking bot was submitted to WP:BRFA.
• September 12, 2009: After many revisions, the bot is approved for a trial run.
• October 2, 2009: The bot completes 51 edits as part of its first trial. Release Candidate 1 is released.
• October 10, 2009: The bot completes 202 edits as part of its second trial. Release Candidate 2 is released.
• November 5, 2009: The bot completes 505 edits as part of its third trial.
• November 7, 2009: Full-date unlinking bot begins full-time operation.
• December 30, 2009: Task is complete.

Criteria for delinking

In line with the consensus reached in this RfC, and to keep potential controversies to a minimum, this bot uses conservative criteria for delinking, allowing for many exceptions to exist where necessary.

As approved by the RFC, the bot will unlink only day-month-year (triple) combinations such as:

• [[January 15]], [[2005]] → January 15, 2005
• [[27 May]] [[2007]] → 27 May 2007
• [[1989-11-05]] → 1989-11-05

Additionally, the bot will unlink month-day items that are clearly adjacent to and in combination with a triple—i.e., in date ranges and slashed dates. Examples are:

• [[October 17]] – [[November 8]], [[1987]] → October 17 – November 8, 1987
• [[23 April|23]]/[[24 April]] [[1966]] → 23/24 April 1966

Notes:

• The bot will only operate on each page once.
• The bot will solve simple grammatical errors that the autoformatter will no longer be able to correct (due to de-linking).

Exceptions

1. Anything outside article space.
2. Links of solitary years ([[1989]]) and solitary month-days ([[November 5]], [[5 November]]), and links such as 1983 in film will not be unlinked by the bot.
3. Intrinsically chronological articles (such as 1789, January, and 1940s) will not be treated by the bot.
4. Each article will be edited only once by the bot while performing this task. If an edit is reverted the article will not be re-treated by the bot.
5. The bot will follow normal bot exclusion rules, using the {{bots}} and {{nobots}} templates.
6. Anything on List of years
7. The pages that {{Lists of years}} links to.

Edit summary codes

The following codes may appear in the edit summaries generated by this bot. Numbers in parentheses indicate repetition counts.

• AMlist – Additional American style month-day parts that are part of a date range or list.
• AModd – American style dates of the form "[[month dd]]...[[yyyy]]", where "..." is something other than a comma+space combination. Punctuation will be replaced with a comma+space combination.
• AMord – American style dates with ordinal days of the form "[[month dth]], [[yyyy]]".
• AMordList – Additional American style ordinal month-dth parts that are part of a date range or list.
• AMreg – American style dates of the form "[[month dd]], [[yyyy]]".
• BRlist – Additional British (international) day-month parts that are part of a date range or list.
• BRodd – British (international) style dates of the form "[[dd month]]...[[yyyy]]", where "..." is something other than a single space. Punctuation will be replaced with a single space.
• BRord – British (international) style dates with ordinal days of the form "[[dth month]], [[yyyy]]".
• BRordlist – Additional British (international) ordinal dth-month parts that are part of a date range or list.
• BRreg – British (international) style dates of the form "[[dd month]] [[yyyy]]".
• ISO1 – ISO 8601 -like dates of the form "[[yyyy-mm-dd]]".
• ISO2 – ISO 8601 -like dates of the form "[[yyyy]]-[[mm-dd]]".
• ordOf – Dates of the form "[[Nth of Month]], [[yyyy]]".
• ordOfList – Additional "Nth of Month" day-month parts that are part of a date range or list.
• piped – Assorted dates that use piped links where the displayed text is a different date form than the link _target.
• pipedList – Additional dates that use piped links that are part of a date range or list.
• YMD – Year-month-day dates of the form "[[yyyy]] [[month dd]]".

The following codes were only used for early testing on 2 & 10 October 2009.

• Lists1 – A two-part date range or combination of the form "[[month/day]]-[[month/day]]...[[yyyy]]", where "month/day" is a "[[month dd]]", "[[dd month]]" or "[[month dd|dd]]" (piped-day) link; "-" can be any of a variety of connector words and/or punctuation; and "..." is any space/comma combination.
• Lists2 – Additional month-day components in a date list adjacent to the left end of a full date or date list, separated by any of a variety of connector words and/or punctuation.

Except for the AModd and BRodd cases, spacing, punctuation, and connector words are generally preserved. The resulting text should appear as it would after date-autoformatting for an anonymous user, absent the links.