Development:MediaWiki/Bots
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To add. Example questions below
Bots/Scripts that we need
- Generate Sitemaps A script to generate Sitemaps to improve our Seo. It's recommended by MediaWiki and used by Miraheze.
Which types of bots do operate on wikipedia?
One way to sort bots is by what activities they perform:
-Content creation, such as by procedural generation
-Fixing errors, such as by copy editing or adressing link rot
-Adding connectors, such as with hyperlinks to content elsewhere
-Tagging content with labels Repairing vandalism, such as ClueBot NG Clerk, updating reports
-Archiving old discussions or tasks
-Moderation systems to combat against spam or misconduct
-Recommender systems to encourage users
-Notifications, such as with push technology and pull technology
How do those bots work?
Computer programs, called bots, have often been used to automate simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles, such as geography entries, in a standard format from statistical data. Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).
Anti-vandalism bots like ClueBot NG are programmed to detect and revert vandalism quickly. Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet incident in July 2014 when it was reported edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government.
Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.
How difficult is it to program a bot? Are there open source bots which could be useful that we could use out of the box?
Writing a new bot requires significant programming ability. A completely new bot must undergo substantial testing before it will be approved for regular operation. Planning is crucial to obtain an error-free, efficient, and effective program. [Link]
Programming a bot is out of reach for me, as I have no experience in this. Also, for our needs it seems to me that would be too much of a hassle, and I recommend first using the Google Docs extension.
In total, there seem to be 59 bots on Wikipedia that have their source code published. [Link] That's out of the 2088 bots [Link].
After looking at [this], the only bot I was able to find is [WP1.0 bot]. I think it's not showing up in the first link from this chapter, where it lists bots with source code published, because of it being outdated.
WP 1.0 bot is used to update [Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index] and its subpages.