User:Mathbot

File:Mathbot2.png

I am smarter than I look.

Oleg Alexandrov is awarded the Barnstar of Diligence for really useful Mathbot. --Latinus (talk (el:)) 22:57, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar Awarded to Mathbot for his tireless editing day and night, his invaluable contributions to WikiProjects and Wikipedia 1.0, and for his diligent avoidance of 3RR, trolling and flame wars. --kingboyk 12:23, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

This bot is operated by Oleg Alexandrov. Please write any comments about this bot on his talk page. See the contributions by this bot.

Mathbot stands for mathematics articles tireless herdsman (and bot).

Mathematical work

List of mathematics articles

Mathbot goes every day through the list of mathematics categories looking for new mathematics and mathematician biography articles, which it appends to the list of mathematics articles and respectively the list of mathematicians. See the changes to the list of mathematics articles by day.

Mathbot is able to search for new math categories which, with some input from bot's boss, it then adds to the list of mathematics categories.

The bot also makes a list of mathematician articles which changed in the last 24 hours and downloads a copy of those to my computer. That information is used to update the dates of birth/death and country information for people in the list of mathematicians.

Missing science topics

Mathbot maintains the mathematics lists at the missing science topics project. It uses various sources to add to the lists of mathematical topics missing from Wikipedia, and it removes the topics which got created. Mathbot is able to suggest potential redirects by comparing the names of missing topics with the names of existing topics. This is done using approximate string matching, and so far resulted in around 750 redirects being created.

Other mathematical

Mathbot suggests entries missing from lists of articles, see talk:list of numerical analysis topics for an example. It also keeps the tables at the PlanetMath Exchange project up-to-date.

Nonmathematical

Taking a cue from his boss that nowadays you can be good at math and starve, mathbot has tried to diversify. It turns out that knowing how to count can bring one a long way, and so mathbot's skills are in demand. :) Here are the tasks mathbot is recently doing.

• Displaying the number of open deletion debates at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Old.
• Adding a link to mathbot's tool for people wishing to be administrators listed at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. Mathbot's tool allows one to check his/her edit summary usage.
• Updating the lists at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index, part of the Wikipedia 1.0 project.
• During the January 2006 ArbCom election, mathbot was posting an hourly update of how the candidates were doing at User:mathbot/Results.

What makes mathbot tick

Mathbot is a collection of scripts written in Perl. It uses the WWW::Mediawiki::Client Perl package to download text from Wikipedia and upload processed text back.