Forum:Is there any way to rename a category, without having to change every page in the category

This concerns The Fire Emblem Wiki.

When we were first working on it (and it had barely 100-200 pages) we wern't too concerned about the names of the categories, but not that we have about 1950+ articles the annoying little problems are getting more and more apparant to me.

(i.e i'd change Sacred Stones Images to The Sacred Stones Images, Fire Emblem:Radiant Dawn characters to Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn characters, and a bunch of other very minor changes)

Now these changes are important for tidy-ing the wiki and keeping the categories consistant. However it will take over a thousand edits to do all these changes that are needed and I can't be bothered to spend that long doing it (would take me about a fortnight to do it).

Is there an easy way to do this.

-- Semaj draehs - any replies to my Talk page  17:13, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Why not have more of your wiki's users help you? It's not something you should have to take on by yourself. If it's an improvement effort, it should be a community effort. - Brandon Rhea (talk) 17:33, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Short answer: no. -- LordTBT Talk! 17:42, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

''Why not have more of your wiki's users help you? It's not something you should have to take on by yourself. If it's an improvement effort, it should be a community effort''

We all have better edits to do, which is why I was trying to find an easier/quicker way. Ther are 4 regular users including me, the other admin is busy working on some nav templates and contributing to pages, another regular user is busy adding a lot of great content pages (and he's on a role, so I don't really wanna disturb him) and the last regular user has his own site and helps us out by lending images from his site aswel as correcting things, but he doesn't really do much of the tidying work. Either way its not really worth it at this point to pull everyone away from more meaningful tasks, so I guess i'll leave it for now and wait til everything else is done, then I might be able to organise a community effort to get it sorted.

-- Semaj draehs - any replies to my Talk page  19:52, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * You can consider using a Bot. Tedjuh10 - Talk 19:56, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

How do you use a bot?

-- Semaj draehs - any replies to my Talk page  21:17, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * You go to wikipedia:Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser, you download it, install it and use it.
 * For me it's the easiest bot.
 * To "rename" the category. You first login into the wiki using your admin account (dont need a bot account) on IE with the "remember me" checked, go to your prefs and switch to Monobook (i fear the bot can't use Monaco but i haven't try). Then you start the bot, go to project setup and choose custom project. Enter fireemblem.wikia.com/, then make the bot login. Now you need to tell him to make a list of pages to change. Select "Category" for the method and enter the name of the category then press "Make list". After this you find the option so the bot perform a replacement in the text of thoses page. In left column you put the text to be replaced and in the next one the new text to put in. On the last tab, you clic "Start". The bot will ask you what to do each time it find something and show a diff page, just click "Save" each time. — TulipVorlax 21:39, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Alternatively, i think i could do it for you. My bot account can edit Wikia wide i think but will not be considered as bot in the RC of wikis where it was not set as bot. — TulipVorlax 21:41, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I've already asked User:Charitwo to help us out and I don't think my computer could run a bot itself anyway (its being very slow), but thanks for the advice I might try it in the future if I come across a similar problem.

-- Semaj draehs - any replies to my Talk page  22:09, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * A few comments:
 * AWB does run on slow computers, but it needs Internet Explorer.
 * Autowikibrowser supports Wikia. You should choose "Wikia" as project and "fireemblem" as your wiki name in its preferences, that will work best.
 * It does work with monaco.
 * Best to run a bot is to register a special account for it (could be "Your username-bot") so that its edits can be easily tracked via the contributions if anything goes wrong
 * Your wiki bureaucrat should give that bot a bot flag; if he can't do that, ask wikia staff. That allows the bot to hide its edits on Recent Changes, and to run fully automatic.
 * Do not use a regular replacement, AWB has an option in the "More..." tab to rename categories, use that.
 * You edit a page by clicking "start", you then get a choice to "save" or "ignore". Do this for a few edits until you feel certain that it works as intended before you switch to "full auto".
 * Any user can stop the bot by posting to its talkpage.
 * -- ◄mendel► 17:18, 14 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Last time i used AWB, it wasn't finding the files it need on Wikia because it was looking at guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/ instead of guildwars.wikia.com/ and it was necessary to set it on a custom project. For many month i was asking the devs to fix that but all they replied to me was that Wikia had to do a symlink.
 * Last time i used AWB, the bot tab wasn't showing even with my bot account.
 * For thoses two reasons i wasn't able to give Semajdraehs indications wich could be untrue. — TulipVorlax 17:12, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I've been using it for almost a year now, setting project to wikia and giving "guildwars" in the line below. I've not tried editing fr.guildwiki . What doesn't work for you? -- ◄mendel► 12:14, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
 * It was after they upgraded to version 4.1. See also Wikia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage and Wikia talk:AutoWikiBrowser. — TulipVorlax 04:40, 18 July 2009 (UTC)


 * If thoses problems are now totally solved, it's great. But i dont use the bot that much.
 * Maybe if i could learn all that it can do... but it was developped for use on english wikis and primarly on Wikipedia; on fr.guildwars, we dont use the templates the bot is set to "care" for. I can't cite any, i dont remember. — TulipVorlax 04:47, 18 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I just updated my AWB installation to 4.6 and tested it; when i use the custom project, all goes well. When i use "Wikia project" it say my bot can't account "can't use this" and redirect me to http://fr.guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Wikia:AutoWikiBrowser/CheckPage instead of the central Wikia check page.
 * So, the anwser is no. I can't use it the way you tell me to.
 * Do you care to help in finding why ? — TulipVorlax 05:21, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Truth be told I'm surprised that redirecting categories is not allowed in wikis. It seems the most obvious solution for such problems. — Hellerick 05:56, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

For the record, pybot is easier in category management as it creates the new category with the original text, and attributes the authors of it, changes all the pages over to the new category, then once the category is empty, it marks it for deletion. -- 12:34, 18 July 2009 (UTC)