Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/WikiCleanerBot 15

The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at

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. The result of the discussion was  Approved.

Operator: NicoV (talk · contribs · SUL · edit count · logs · page moves · block log · rights log · ANI search)

Time filed: 10:25, Saturday, April 25, 2020 (

Function overview: Do edit for fixing CW Error #551 (Empty line).

Automatic, Supervised, or Manual: Automatic

Programming language(s): Java (WPCleaner)

Source code available: On GitHub (especially algorithm 551)

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate):

Edit period(s): Twice a month

Estimated number of pages affected: A dry run on the 2592 pages in Wikipedia:CHECKWIKI/WPC 551 dump‎ results in the modification of 280 pages.

Namespace(s): Main

Exclusion compliant (Yes/No): Yes

Function details: The bot will remove useless lines in the form ''<nowiki/>'' or similar because such lines are useless and are probably a bug due to the Visual Editor (VE) or the Translation tool (CX). It will help fixing some issues not fixed with the split links and the links without text.

I already run a similar task on frwiki with 92 edits.

This seems to be an entirely cosmetic and potentially unnecessary edit. Why is this sort of "error" worth a bot? (I'm genuinely curious) Primefac (talk) 19:06, 11 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Primefac. It can be considered cosmetic, and I can run it as such if preferred. I added this fix as I saw that several fixes for split links or links without text could be enhanced with also this. Personally, I think that we should try to fix as much of the garbage produced by CX or VE as possible. As frwiki is more open to such edits (less restrictive on cosmetic edits), I developed the fix for there, and it's not much work to apply it here also, so I opened this request. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 10:24, 12 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And also : some of the errors reported in the list also trigger errors in Special:LintErrors/missing-end-tag (like bold alone on its line), but it will require manual fixing. Trimming the list by a bot leaves less work to humans. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 08:00, 15 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. Primefac (talk) 18:01, 22 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Trial complete. @Primefac:. Thanks, I've done 50 edits. I didn't see any problems in the edits. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 14:59, 24 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 Approved. Edits looked good to me. Approved. As per usual, if amendments to - or clarifications regarding - this approval are needed, please start a discussion on the talk page and ping. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 05:24, 27 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at

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