User:LinkFA-Bot

This user account is a bot operated by Guandalug (talk). It is used to make repetitive automated or semi-automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually, in accordance with the bot policy. This bot does not yet have the approval of the community, or approval has been withdrawn or expired, and therefore shouldn't be making edits that appear to be unassisted except in the operator's or its own user and user talk space. Administrators: if this bot is making edits that appear to be unassisted to pages not in the operator's or its own userspace, please block it.

The LinkFA - Bot has been written in PHP and tries to keep the usage of {{Link FA|xx}} and {{Link GA|xx}} current.

If it's working, it has the following phases:

Init phase

Gather all articles that use a 'Link FA' template in those wikipedia-versions the bot should edit in one table. Check all featured - templates and categories from foreign wikipedias and gather the articles that are thus marked as featured in another table.

Check

For each article that holds a 'Link FA' template, check whether all Interwiki - linked articles are marked as "featured" (by checking whether they are in the table of featured articles) and set / remove the respective {{Link FA|xx}} template (all in one go per article).

Search

For each featured article we gathered during init, try and check whether the remote article links to an article in one of the languages we work on. If so, and said article is not yet 'done' in the 'Check' step, that must be an unmarked and up to now unchecked article locally, so call a 'check on that article.

A more detailed description of the bot work can be found here

• The excellency -templates and -categories of foreign wikis must be listed as links either in Templates or Categories, or the bot won't accept foreign "featured" marks and dump the markup template.
• The page to be updated locally must not be edit-protected with level 'sysop'.

Why did the bot delete the 'Link FA' markup on Article XY?

There's a couple of possible answers to that:

• The article at the other end of the interwiki link is not a featured article, but a featured portal or a featured list - those don't get marked with the 'Link FA' template, or the article isn't even "featured" but just good.
• At the time the bot checked the list of 'featured articles' on the other wiki, that article wasn't marked (for whatever reason)
• The bot didn't know/recognize the "Featured" template used in the remote article

Article XYZ is featured for a while now, why didn't the bot add the markup yet?

New markups (introducing {{Link FA|..}} to pages that don't have one) only happens when the page in question is linked from a 'featured' article on a remote wiki and already links back to that article. Building up the interwiki link net is something this bot does not participate in.