Wowpedia:Wiki bots

We frequently talk about two kinds of "bots" without making any real distinction, though the difference is rather huge:

Spam bots

Run by malicious people to vandalize wiki pages en masse. Also sneaky bots. These get listed in the list of known vandals and their changes reverted.

Wiki bots

This is what this article addresses.

Wiki bots

When we talk about wiki bots, we mainly talk about scripts that edit the wiki in a semi-automated manner.

This includes regular users running a batch script to apply a change to many pages, but it can also mean an automated script that keeps doing the same thing over and over again according to a schedule.

Examples of scripts:

• Mikk has a few on User:Mikk/Scripts
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MediaWiki_tools
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bot
• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pywikipedia

The most general-purpose one is probably the Pywikipediabot.

Why the "bot" tag?

Bureaucrat admins can tag a user account as a "bot". Edits by such accounts can be hidden in the lists of recent changes, which can help reduce the amount of work needed by the RC Patrol.

• List of WoWWiki accounts tagged as bots

Regular user accounts are never tagged as bots, even if some of them do more editing than some of our bot scripts. Only secondary accounts are bot tagged, c.f. Mikk vs Mikkbot. They do not need to have "bot" in their names, but we do encourage it.

How do I apply for a bot account?

Even if you use a script to help with some of your edits, you do not necessarily need a bot account. Unless you are doing truly massive amounts of automated editing, and/or expect to do it repeatedly, just run the scripts from your regular user.

So, how to do it?

• Create a new account. Preferably based on your user name with "bot" in it.

• Ask a bureaucrat to add it to the "bots" group.

• Done!