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Overview of bots Creating a bot Bot Approvals Group Bot policy List of bots BAG tools Bot owners' noticeboard Requests for bot approval / Adminbots Requests for work to be done by a bot

A physical bot

A bot (derived from the word "robot") is an automated or semi-automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain the 4,233,701 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 1,715 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 740 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

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 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. 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

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

1. Go to your Special:MyPage/skin.js page, and add importScript('User:UncleDouggie/smart watchlist.js'); (diff)
2. Remember to bypass your browser's cache.
3. 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

1. If you find this box annoying, go to your Special:MyPage/skin.css page and add #SmartWatchlistOptions {display:none ! important;} (diff)
2. Remember to bypass your browser's cache.
3. 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.

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
• User:BracketBot - notifies users of mismatched brackets in recently edited articles.

See also

This page is referenced from the Wikipedia:Glossary.

• Internet bot

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

• Help:MakeBot (inactive)

Meta

• meta:bot
• meta:Bot policy
• meta:Countervandalism Network/Bots