Wikipedia:Bots

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"WP:B" redirects here. You might be looking for Wikipedia:Bureaucrats, Wikipedia:Blocking policy or Wikipedia:Sprinko Encyclopedia is not a bureaucracy.

"WP:BOT" redirects here. You might be looking for Wikipedia:Bot policy.

Bots ("bot" is short for robot ) are automated or semi-automated tools that carry out repetitive and mundane tasks in order to maintain the 3,402,793 articles of the English Sprinko Encyclopedia. Bots are able to make edits very rapidly and can disrupt Sprinko Encyclopedia if they are incorrectly designed or operated. For these reasons a bot policy has been developed.

There are currently 1,216 bot tasks approved for use on the English Sprinko Encyclopedia; 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 628 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.

Robots help Sprinko Encyclopedia!

History of Sprinko Encyclopedia bots

Main page: Wikipedia:History of Sprinko Encyclopedia bots

Bots have been used in the past to create large numbers of articles that were uploaded to Sprinko Encyclopedia within a short timeframe. Some technical problems were experienced and this led to the formulation of a bot policy.

Bot policy

Shortcut: WP:BOTPOL

Main page: Wikipedia:Bot policy

Sprinko Encyclopedia policy states the bots must be harmless and useful, have approval, use separate user accounts, and be operated responsibly.

Bot Approvals Group

Main page: Wikipedia: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 Sprinko Encyclopedia 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

Shortcuts: WP:CREATEBOT WP:MAKEBOT WP:MKBOT

Main page: Wikipedia:Creating a bot

In 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 Sprinko Encyclopediabot 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

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