User talk:ButlerBlogBot

Was this discussed somewhere? I don't believe there is any guideline or documentation stating that Infobox film cannot have date ranges when used for franchises, and dates are definitely expected for most media page infoboxes. If this bot is bulk removing dates from articles based on someone's personal opinion then that would be very concerning. - adamstom97 (talk) 18:31, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The {{Infobox film}} template is intended for individual films, not franchises, series, or lists: Infobox film is used to create an infobox which summarizes the main information of a particular motion picture (emphasis added). Hence, everything in its documentation is specific to an individual film. So, the documentation for |released= does not specifically state "don't use a date range for film franchises" because none of the infobox applies to that use case. ButlerBlog (talk) 18:40, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is no separate Infobox for film franchises and this one is clearly used for that purpose at many articles. Your opinion that it is being used incorrectly is not enough to blanket remove details from the articles like this, especially without discussion. If you genuinely think the template should only be used for individual film articles and want to stop other uses, you should be starting a discussion about removing/replacing the templates entirely rather than leaving them but deleting some of the data. That doesn't solve the underlying issue that you think exists. - adamstom97 (talk) 18:50, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The infobox film is really misused for anything that isn't a film entity. If {{Infobox media franchise}} isn't good (why isn't it?), a new infobox can be created to fit the needs of a franchise or film series. I'll note though, that it would seem that most often, not only is the infobox being misused, it's also a complete duplication of a table in the article.

In my opinion, an infobox for a franchise or film series, should not list every individual that directed, produced, wrote, etc., a film in the series, and should be a much smaller infobox in scope. Gonnym (talk) 18:51, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not arguing for or against that here, and I don't think this is the place to have that conversation. I just think that conversation needed to happen before a bot made bulk changes to hundrends of articles. If there is consensus that Infobox film shouldn't be used for franchise articles then the resolution would be to remove or replace the infoboxes, not delete random details. And if there is no consensus that Infobox film shouldn't be used for franchise articles then this bot should not be making this change either. - adamstom97 (talk) 18:57, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I totally agree with your premise, @Gonnym. However, @Adamstom.97 does raise a reasonable point: removing the date range from |released= doesn't actually solve the problem. The actual problem would be solved by changing the infobox to {{Infobox media franchise}}.

As to the suggestion that it's "hundreds of articles" - that's far from the case. It's a little over a hundred - and I happen to keep a log, so it's possible to go back and revert were that necessary (which I don't think it is). It doesn't matter whether it's a bot task or an individual - it's the same change regardless. So based on that, I've halted further changes. ButlerBlog (talk) 19:01, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ranges aren't explicitly excluded from the documentation. That wording is not there and you're thus jumping to conclusions regarding that. I agree that the film infobox (at the moment) is the best to present such information. If anyone wants to start a discussion about the creation of an alternative, I'm happy to chime in at that. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 18:59, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I certainly don't have a problem with discussion regarding whether this is the appropriate infobox or not and whether a new one is necessary. However, I'm going to disagree with the fact that it needs to be explicitly excluded. In this instance, the wording is clear that this infobox is intended for an individual film, and since that's the case, it's unnecessary for the individual parameter to have to state anything other than what is implied by the infobox's use case. If we approached any given infobox parameter with the thought that the specific parameter had to explicitly state some misuse that would be implied by the infobox itself, that would be impractical when documenting each parameter. ButlerBlog (talk) 19:07, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I may be wrong, but I think you need to get consensus on how to handle this with your bot (eg infobox type change), not just delete detail which is sometimes referenced. Esowteric + Talk + Breadcrumbs 19:19, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's not wrong. However, to clarify, the bot is not changing the infobox type - and it would be very unlikely that this bot would be applied to do that anyway, should that turn out to be the resolution. The change the bot was making was removing date ranges, which is part of an existing task that the bot does when resolving dates in {{Infobox film}}, {{Infobox television}}, and {{Episode list}} (generally, fixing what is found in Category:Pages using infobox film with nonstandard dates, Category:Pages using infobox television with nonstandard dates, and Category:Episode lists with unformatted air dates). ButlerBlog (talk) 19:27, 6 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Twice the bot has broken Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny... Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 02:51, 14 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There was a bug related to the nested infoboxes. That has been corrected. The bot is reading the contents of a maintenance category and it can't read edit summaries, so when there's a mistake by the bot, notify the bot operator first. Then it won't come back around the second time. TIA. ButlerBlog (talk) 12:32, 14 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]