Kwamikagami

Need your advice

Hello, @Kwamikagami . Can you advise me? How can I fix the same mistakes in many articles? How did you replace the Latin letter with the Cyrillic letter? Can you teach me? Sincerely, Adam-Yourist (къамаьл) 19:35, 3 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

@Adam-Yourist: Hi Adam!

The easiest way is with Auto Wiki Browser (AWB), which you can find a description of at ru:Википедия:AutoWikiBrowser.

I can't use that because I'm on a Linux machine, and AWB is for Microsoft. So I needed to use the WP substitute, Javascript Wiki Browser. If you want to do the same, you would go to go to Участник:Adam-Yourist/common.js and add the line:

mw.loader.load('//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Joeytje50/JWB.js/load.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

Now you should see "JS Wiki Browser" in the tools on the left of your screen (down with "email this user", "user logs", "special pages", etc.)

Once you see that, just click on it. I can give you advice on how to use it, but it is very much like AWB.

Then you need to be able to choose a list of articles for AWB or JSWB to edit. AWB is much more powerful in this regard. For example, with AWB you can search the last 1,000 articles you edited, or created, or whatever. With JSWB, you have to manually enter a list.

One place to get a list is at [:https://quarry.wmcloud.org/]. This is what I did. There you enter the WP you want to search (inh) along with what you're looking for. I don't understand the syntax, so I just copied from someone else. I entered:

SELECT page_title
FROM page
WHERE page_namespace = 0 
  AND page_is_redirect = 0 
  AND page_title RLIKE "ӏ";

-- where in the last line I searched for the small palochka «ӏ» in article titles.

(If you log in, you can see my last query here.)

You can of course also search for capital Latin «I», capital Cyrillic «І», the Arabic digit «1», etc.

SQL search will then generate a list of articles with «ӏ» (or whatever) in the title, which you can then copy and paste into JS Wiki Browser (or AWB), which can then do whatever you need to do. So I changed all Latin «I» and Cyrillic «І» to palochka «ӏ», but then changed palochka back to Latin «I» when it was next to another «I», «X» or «V», or surrounded by spaces or punctuation (e.g. for Peter II, XIV century, etc.) I'm not very good with coding, so I had to make multiple runs of the articles to fix the errors I made in the first run.

You can just tell AWB to replace X with Y. But often you need to use regular expressions (regex). You can find a description at

ru:Регулярные выражения.

I have to do test runs to work out the bugs in my search-and-replace coding, because it never seems to work right the first time, but I can try to help further if you get stuck. Kwamikagami (къамаьл) 20:51, 3 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. But I don't think I fully understood. For example, I need to replace "one word" with "another word" in 30 articles (not in the title of the article, but inside the body of the article). Once I've got the required list of pages, what do I need to do next? Adam-Yourist (къамаьл) 21:57, 5 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

@Adam-Yourist: No problem!

Click on "JS Wiki Browser" on the side of your screen (near "create a book", "download as PDF", "printable version" etc.)

(If you don't see it, and you have already changed Участник:Adam-Yourist/common.js, then you might need to refresh your screen, or close your WP window and come back. You shouldn't need to log out.)

The app should open up in a second or two. I'm assuming the rest will be in English, so I'll copy what I see.

In the bottom left window, where it says "Enter list of pages:", paste (or type) your list of pages.

To the right of that window, there are three tabs: "Setup", "Editing", "Skip". Click on "Editing".

Under "Summary:", enter the edit summary you want.

Below that, there are "Skip", "Save", "Preview", "Diff" buttons, and below that, there are "Replace" and "With" cells. Enter your search word in "replace" and replacement word in "with".

Check the "regular expressions" box if you're using Regex to search, or else Regex won't work.

Look up a bit. There are "Start" and "stop" buttons. Click "start".

If you like the change that is made, click "save". Otherwise click "skip", or manually edit the page in the "Editing area - You are editing:" window (lower right). Of course, you can use "preview" and "diff" just as with manually editing WP.

You may decide that your replacement rule can be improved. To change it, you will first need to hit "stop". (You can't change JSWB while it's running, you can only change articles.)

If you want to find-replace more than one thing, leave the "replace" and "with" cells empty. Instead, click the grey "More replace fields" button just above them. A pop-up window will open. Fill out the first one, then click "add more fields" until you're done. To return to the main page and start editing, just click outside the pop-up window. Kwamikagami (къамаьл) 23:44, 5 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

I understood everything, except for one thing... Sorry. What exactly should be written in the "Summary" column? For example? Adam-Yourist (къамаьл) 00:34, 6 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

You don't need to write anything. If you don't, the edit summary will be just "(via JWB)". Or you could write whatever you would for a manual edit: "typo", "correction" etc. You can even leave off the "(via JWB)" tag, by removing the green check-mark from the box to its right, but IMO it's best to leave it in. The JWB tag makes it easier later to search through your own edits in your edit history.

So for example my edit summary was "palochka «Ӏ» (via JWB)", because if someone else were to look at the change to the page, it would not be visually obvious what I did.

If you have a bunch of jobs, you might even write "Job 1", "Job 2" etc. Then later you will be able to retrace your progress by searching for "Job 1 (via JWB)" in your contributions history. Kwamikagami (къамаьл) 00:49, 6 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

God, so that's what it means. I just didn't get it and thought it was something complicated :) Thank you very much! Adam-Yourist (къамаьл) 01:36, 6 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I wasn't sure how to answer! Kwamikagami (къамаьл) 01:45, 6 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

You helped me a lot! Adam-Yourist (къамаьл) 14:03, 6 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

Sorry again. Is it possible to rename pages with this application? If yes, how to do it? Adam-Yourist (къамаьл) 15:34, 6 Тушол 2023 (UTC)

I think you can do that with AWB. At least, I think I remember doing that, but it was years ago. I believe that you cannot do it with JWB, but I don't really know. I would suggest asking the creator, en:User:Joeytje50. Kwamikagami (къамаьл) 21:49, 6 Тушол 2023 (UTC)