Background

Many geographical location pages were created early on with the {{GR}} template. Specifically for this task, {{GR|3}} would produce a reference to the Geographic Names Information System, per Wikipedia:Geographic references#United States.

The {{GR}} template was deleted following this TfD in 2014. SporkBot was used to replace the GR template with a generic {{cite web}} reference in its stead.

This task aims to replace all such instances with updated, specific references, using the {{cite gnis}} template.

Task 1.1 is a subset of this task that logs all failed replacements at User:StaractionBot/Tasks/1/logged. It does not require its own separate BRFA because it only makes edits to userspace.

Relevant discussions on-wiki

Consensus for the task was reached at this WikiProject United States discussion thread. The BRFA for this task can be found here.

Technical

The bot is written in Python, using Pywikibot. The source code for this task is on GitHub (fair warning: it's not pretty).

Thank you...

...to theleekycauldron for helping me figure out how to run a bot. You're a wonderful mentor & human being and I'm very grateful to have you as a friend!