Wikipedia:Bots

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A physical bot

Shortcuts: WP:B WP:BOT WP:BOTS

A bot (derived from 'robot') is an automated or semi-automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks in order to maintain the 4,015,701 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 1,578 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 708 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.

[edit] History

Main page: Wikipedia: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.

[edit] Bot policy

Main page: Wikipedia:Bot policy

Wikipedia policy requires that bots be harmless and useful, have approval, use separate user accounts, and be operated responsibly.

[edit] Bot Approvals Group

Main page: Wikipedia: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.

[edit] How to create a bot

Main page: Wikipedia:Creating 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, Chicken Scheme, Common Lisp and Haskell programming languages all have libraries available for creating bots. Pywikipedia (Python Wikipediabot Framework) is a collection of tools developed specifically for creating bots.

[edit] How to hide a specific bot from your watchlist

Shortcuts: WP:HIDEBOT WP:HIDEBOTS

There is no way of hiding bots through user preferences or default watchlist settings. However, it is possible with a user script by following these simple steps.

Main steps

Go to your Special:MyPage/skin.js page, and add importScript('User:UncleDouggie/smart watchlist.js'); (diff)
Remember to bypass your browser's cache.
Then go to your watchlist. There should be a box with several options, and tick the 'Enable hide user buttons' box. This will let you hide specific bots (and users) from your watchlist.

Note: You might want to untick the 'Enable hide user buttons' box after you ignore a bot to ensure that you don't accidentally click 'hide user' when browsing your watchlist.

Optional steps

If you find this box annoying, go to your Special:MyPage/skin.css page and add #SmartWatchlistOptions {display:none ! important;} (diff)
Remember to bypass your browser's cache.
If you want to show the box again, for example to reset your ignore list, go to your Special:MyPage/skin.css page and remove #SmartWatchlistOptions {display:none ! important;} and remember to bypass your browser's cache. Redoing optional steps #1 and #2 will hide the box again.

While you are completely free to ignore any bots (or users) you want, it's a good idea to only ignore bots with well-defined tasks, which you trust to not make any mistakes.

[edit] Examples

Some examples of bots are:

User:Cydebot – generally carries out tasks associated with deletion
User:WP 1.0 bot – works with the Version 1.0 Editorial Team
User:SineBot – signs comments left on talk pages
User:ClueBot NG – reverts vandalism
User:CorenSearchBot – checks for copyright violations on new pages
User:AnomieBOT – large variety of tasks
User:DumbBOT – often removes protection templates from recently unprotected pages
User:Lowercase sigmabot – often adds protection templates to recently protected pages
User:Mr.Z-bot – will patrol BLP and the edit filters
User:MiszaBot – archives talk pages