Introduction to bots on wikipedia

Introduction to Bots on Wikipedia User:Tinucherian 13-June-2010 – WikiMeetup 15 Bangalore

Huh, Wikipedia is edited by bots?
I thought Wikipedia is edited by humans, aliens , rogue admins and Jimmy Wales only!
Wikipedia – “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”
And why not bots ?

Why need Bots ?
Primarily to carry out repetitive and mundane tasks in order to maintain the 3,250,454+ articles of the English Wikipedia alone.
Imagine adding a category or template to 1000 articles.. Why do you want a human to do this ? They have better things to do !

Bots – Some stats
1,141+ bot tasks approved for use
614+ bots flagged with the "bot" flag right now.
This is for English language Wikipedia alone !
There are 272 language wikipedias and bots running on most of them.
You didn’t know, right ? ;)

Can everybody run bots ? NO !
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.
ONLY “Trusted users” are allowed to operate Bots !
Wikipedia policy states the bots must be harmless and useful, have approval, use separate user accounts, and be operated responsibly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_policy

I can’t write bots ,but I have a bot task to do!
Don’t worry, just place a bot task request !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_requests

Different kinds of Bots
User:ClueBot - reverts vandalism
User:CorenSearchBot - checks for copyright violations on new pages
User:DumbBOT - often removes protection templates from recently unprotected pages.
User:OrphanBot - removes a particular set of images from articles
Interwiki Bots – Add interwikilinks to articles

I have a bot idea, how do I create one ?
Write the progam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Creating_a_bot
Create a bot username.
Get the Bot task approval WP:BRFA
Get a bot flag
Run !

How to get approval for my Bot ?
File a BRFA – Bots Requests for approval
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval
Bot task are approved by BAG ( Bot Approval Group) members
Bot flags are granted by Bureaucrats

Pywikipediabot
The Python Wikipediabot Framework (pywikipedia) is a collection of tools that automate work on Wikipedia or other MediaWiki sites. It's written in Python, which is a free, cross-platform programming language.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pywikipediabot
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pywikipediabot/Scripts

Questions ?

Introduction to bots on wikipedia

by Wikimedia India on Jun 20, 2010

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