Wikipedia:Bots
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Bots are automated or semi-automated tools that carry out repetitive and mundane tasks in order to maintain the 6,822,766 articles of the English Wikipedia. Bots are able to make edits very rapidly and can disrupt Wikipedia if they are incorrectly designed or operated. For these reasons a bot policy has been developed.
There are currently 2,689 bot tasks approved for use on the English Wikipedia; however, they are not all actively carrying out edits. Bots will leave messages on user talk pages if the action the bot has carried out is of interest to that editor. Some bots can be excluded from leaving these messages by using the {{bots}} tags. Exclusion-compliant bots are listed at Category:Wikipedia bots which are exclusion compliant.
There are exactly 295 bots flagged with the "bot" flag right now.
There is also a range of tools that allow for semi-automated editing of large numbers of articles.
History of Wikipedia bots
Bots have been used in the past to create large numbers of articles that were uploaded to Wikipedia within a short timeframe. Some technical problems were experienced and this led to the formulation of a bot policy.
Bot policy
Wikipedia policy states the bots must be harmless and useful, have approval, use separate user accounts, and be operated responsibly.
Bot Approvals Group
The Bot Approvals Group (BAG) supervises and approves all bot-related activity from a technical and quality-control perspective on behalf of the English Wikipedia community. Only bureaucrats are technically capable of flagging bots.
Running an automated bot on a separate account requires approval, which may be requested at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval.
How to create a bot
In order to create a bot, some programming experience is needed, and knowledge of regular expressions is useful for many editing tasks.
The Perl, PHP, Python, Microsoft .NET, Java, Ruby and Chicken Scheme programming languages all have libraries available for creating bots. Pywikipedia (Python Wikipediabot Framework) is a collection of tools developed specifically for creating bots.
Examples
Some examples of bots are:
- User:SmackBot - corrects ISBN numbering, adds a date parameter to maintenance tags, adds missing reference sections and a variety of other tasks
- User:Cydebot - generally carries out tasks associated with deletion
- User:WP 1.0 bot - works with the Version 1.0 Editorial Team
- User:OrphanBot - removes a particular set of images from articles
- User:SineBot - signs comments left on talk pages
- User:ClueBot - reverts vandalism
- User:CorenSearchBot - checks for copyright violations on new pages
- User:AnomieBOT - variety of tasks
- User:DumbBOT - often removes protection templates from recently unprotected pages
- User:WildBot - usually searches for ambiguous links or broken section links
- User:Mr.Z-bot - will patrol BLP and the edit filters
See also
- Wikipedia space
- Wikipedia:Bots/Status (this page will need updating)
- Wikipedia:Registered bots (historical only)
- Wikipedia:Types of bots
- Wikipedia:List of bots by number of edits
- Help
- Meta