Bot

MediaWiki.org wiki has a page about this at:

Help:Bots

A bot is a automated software program used to perform certain repetitive tasks on a wiki. Bots typically require approval to operate, and are occasionally used by vandals to cause extensive damage to a wiki's content in a short period of time.

Special:ListUsers/bot produces a list of all accounts which are member of the “Bots” user group. Additionally, “bot” is a user right. Edits by a user with this “right” (read: property) do not show up in recent changes by default. Typically a user from the group “Bots” will have the “bot” user right. User rights are often called “flags” and bots with user right “bot” are often called “flagged” bots.

Running your own bot

• Using Pywikibot
• English Wikipedia bot policy
• Steward requests/Bot status — to request an account be marked with a bot flag (for wikis without any active bureaucrat)
• Setting bot access — information for people running their own MediaWiki installation. Can be changed at Special:UserRights
• wikitech:Help:Toolforge/Developing successful tools — best practices for all bot-owners

Current and proposed bots

• Interwiki bot — includes details of Pywikibot
• Uploadable Bots — a feature suggestion
• Copyright bot — a proposal for finding copyright violations
• Translation bot — proposal for a bot to translate taxonomic information.
• KoyomiBot — proposal for a Japanese Wikipedia bot

Miscellaneous bot pages

• Bot policy
• Lists of bots - where to find bots used by Wikipedia and other Wikimedia foundation bot families.
• Vandalbot – advice on dealing with malicious bots
• robots.txt — file which tells web robots how to index your site.
• Rollback — includes instructions for using "bot rollback" to hide vandalism from recent changes
• Botopedia international project for generating Wikipedia articles from statistical data.

Frameworks and interfaces for bot development

• Pywikibot (Python)
• DotNetWikiBot Framework (.NET Framework 2.0, C#)
• wiki-java (Java)
• Java Wiki Bot Framework (Java)
• MediaWiki::Bot (Perl)
• Bgbot (PHP)
• PHP mediawiki bot (PHP)
• jwiki (Java)
• BotWikiAwk (Awk)

See also

• BotWiki