Wikipedia:Bots
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This information page describes the editing community's consensus on some aspect or aspects of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. |
A bot (a common nickname for software robot) is an automated or semi-automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain the 41,848,687 pages 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 2,075 bot tasks approved for use on the English Wikipedia; however, not all approved tasks involve actively carrying out edits. Bots will leave messages on user talk pages if the action that 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. There are 160 exclusion-compliant bots, which are listed in this category. There are 314 bots flagged with the "bot" flag right now. There is also a range of tools that allow semi-automated editing of large numbers of articles.
Contents
History
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, as well as a restriction on the automated, large-scale, creation of articles.
Bot policy
Wikipedia policy requires that bots 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. On the English Wikipedia, the right to flag a bot is limited to bureaucrats.
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
Some programming experience is needed to create a bot and knowledge of regular expressions is useful for many editing tasks.
The Chicken Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskell, Java, Microsoft .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby programming languages all have libraries available for creating bots. Pywikipedia (Python Wikipediabot Framework) is a collection of tools developed specifically for creating bots.
How to hide a specific bot from your watchlist
There is no way of hiding specific 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/common.js page, and add
importScript('User:UncleDouggie/smart watchlist.js');
(diff) - Remember to bypass your browser's cache.
- Go to your watchlist. There should be a box with several options. 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/common.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/common.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.
How to hide AWB edits from your watchlist
There is no way of hiding AWB edits 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/common.js page, and add the following two lines (diff):
importScript( 'User:Evad37/Watchlist-hideAWB.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Evad37/Watchlist-hideAWB]]
var awbHiddenByDefault = true;
- Remember to bypass your browser's cache.
Declared AWB edits will now be hidden by default. You may display them by clicking on the "show AWB" tab at the top of your watchlist (next to "Special page" for Monobook skin, or in the "More" dropdown for Vector skin).
Notes:
- If you leave out
var awbHiddenByDefault = true;
, AWB edits will be shown by default, but you will have the option of hiding AWB edits by clicking on the "hide AWB" tab at the top of your watchlist. - While you are completely free to ignore AWB edits, remember that many of them will contain substantial changes from human editors, not just minor edits from bots or meatbots.
- When hiding edits with a script, earlier edits can be forced to appear. Using the
Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent
preference option is necessary to see other non-hidden watchlist hits for a page.
Examples
Some examples of bots are:
- User:AAlertBot – delivering article alerts to WikiProjects about ongoing discussions.
- User:AnomieBOT – large variety of tasks, most well known for adding dates to amboxes.
- User:BracketBot – notifies users of mismatched brackets in recently edited articles.
- User:ClueBot NG – reverts vandalism.
- User:CorenSearchBot – checks for copyright violations on new pages.
- User:Cydebot – generally carries out tasks associated with deletion.
- User:DumbBOT – often removes protection templates from recently unprotected pages.
- User:ListeriaBot – Experimental bot by Magnus Manske. It generates and updates lists on Wikipedia.
- User:Lowercase sigmabot – often adds protection templates to recently protected pages.
- User:Lowercase sigmabot III – archives talk pages.
- User:Mr.Z-bot – will patrol the living persons and the edit filters.
- User:ProcseeBot – automatically blocks proxies due to both the local policy against open proxies.
- User:SineBot – signs comments left on talk pages.
- User:Yobot – syntax fixes and tagging.
- User:WP 1.0 bot – works with the Version 1.0 Editorial Team.
See also
This page is referenced from the glossary. | ![]() |
- Wikipedia space
- Wikipedia:Bots/Status (this page will need updating)
- Wikipedia:Types of bots
- Help
- Help:MakeBot (inactive)
- Meta