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Bots are automated or semi-automated tools that carry out repetitive and mundane tasks in order to maintain the 6,931,203 articles of the English Misplaced Pages. Bots are able to make edits very rapidly and can disrupt Misplaced Pages if they are incorrectly designed or operated. For these reasons a bot policy has been developed.
There are currently 2,729 bot tasks approved for use on the English Misplaced Pages; 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:Misplaced Pages bots which are exclusion compliant.
There are exactly 299 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 of Misplaced Pages bots
Main page: Misplaced Pages:History of Misplaced Pages botsBots have been used in the past to create large numbers of articles that were uploaded to Misplaced Pages within a short timeframe. Some technical problems were experienced and this led to the formulation of a bot policy.
Bot policy
Shortcut Main page: Misplaced Pages:Bot policyMisplaced Pages policy states the bots must be harmless and useful, have approval, use separate user accounts, and be operated responsibly.
Bot Approvals Group
Main page: Misplaced Pages:Bot Approvals GroupThe Bot Approvals Group (BAG) supervises and approves all bot-related activity from a technical and quality-control perspective on behalf of the English Misplaced Pages community. Only bureaucrats are technically capable of flagging bots.
Running an automated bot on a separate account requires approval, which may be requested at Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests for approval.
How to create a bot
Shortcuts Main page: Misplaced Pages:Creating a botIn 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 and Chicken Scheme programming languages all have libraries available for creating bots. Pywikipedia (Python Wikipediabot Framework) is a collection of tools developed specifically for creating bots.
Examples
Some examples of bots are:
- User:SmackBot - corrects ISBN numbering, adds a date parameter to maintenance tags, adds missing reference sections and a variety of other tasks
- User:Cydebot - generally carries out tasks associated with deletion
- User:WP 1.0 bot - works with the Version 1.0 Editorial Team
- User:OrphanBot - removes a particular set of images from articles
- User:SineBot - signs comments left on talk pages
- User:ClueBot - reverts vandalism
- User:CorenSearchBot - checks for copyright violations on new pages
- User:AnomieBOT - variety of tasks
- User:DumbBOT - often removes protection templates from recently unprotected pages
- User:WildBot - usually searches for ambiguous links or broken section links
- User:Mr.Z-bot - will patrol BLP and the edit filters
See also
- Misplaced Pages space
- Misplaced Pages:Bots/Status (this page will need updating)
- Misplaced Pages:Registered bots (historical only)
- Misplaced Pages:Types of bots
- Misplaced Pages:List of bots by number of edits
- Help
- Meta