![]() | This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, but rather intends to describe some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect varying levels of vetting. |
![]() | This page in a nutshell: On Wikipedia, bots are computer-controlled user accounts performing various tasks in order to maintain the encyclopedia. Bots are used for many purposes, for instance removing obvious vandalism and archiving talk pages. All bots must be approved by a special group before they are put into use. |
A bot (a common nickname for software robot) is an automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain the 49,992,072 pages 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 2,391 bot tasks approved for use on the English Wikipedia; however, not all approved tasks involve actively carrying out edits. Bots will leave messages on user talk pages if the action that 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. There are 191 exclusion-compliant bots, which are listed in this category. There are 312 bots flagged with the "bot" flag right now (and over 400 former bots). There is also a range of tools that allow semi-automated editing of large numbers of articles.
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, as well as a restriction on the automated, large-scale, creation of articles.
Wikipedia policy requires that bots be harmless and useful, have approval, use separate user accounts, and be operated responsibly.
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. On the English Wikipedia, the right to flag a bot is limited to bureaucrats.
Running an automated bot on a separate account requires approval, which may be requested at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval.
Some programming experience generally is needed to create a bot and knowledge of regular expressions is useful for many editing tasks. However, some of the more user-friendly tools, such as AutoWikiBrowser or JavaScript Wiki Browser, can be used for some tasks.
The Chicken Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskell, Java, Microsoft .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby programming languages all have libraries available for creating bots. Pywikibot is a commonly used Python package developed specifically for creating MediaWiki bots.
While it is easy to hide all bots 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
importScript('User:UncleDouggie/smart_watchlist.js'); // Backlink: [[User:UncleDouggie/smart_watchlist]]
Optional steps
#SmartWatchlistOptions {display:none ! important;}
While you are completely free to ignore any bots (or users) you want, it is a good idea to only ignore bots with well-defined tasks, which you trust to not make any mistakes.
There is no way of hiding AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) edits through user preferences or default watchlist settings. However, it is possible with a user script by following these steps:
Steps
importScript( 'User:Evad37/Watchlist-hideAWB.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Evad37/Watchlist-hideAWB]]
var awbHiddenByDefault = true;
Any edit with "AWB" in its edit summary will now default to hidden for you. You may reveal them by clicking on the "show AWB" tab at the top of your watchlist (next to "Special page" for Monobook skin, or in the "More" drop down for Vector skin).
Notes:
var awbHiddenByDefault = true;
, AWB edits will be shown by default, but you will have the option of hiding AWB edits by clicking on the "hide AWB" tab at the top of your watchlist.Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent
preference option is necessary to see other non-hidden watchlist hits for a page.Some examples of bots are:
Articles
Categories
Meta
Barnstar
{{The Bot Creator Barnstar|put your message here. ~~~~}}
—Awarded to an editor for creating a bot.![]() |
The Bot Creator Barnstar | |
put your message here. ~~~~ |
{{Bot operator's barnstar|put your message here. ~~~~|alt}}
—Bot operator's barnstar, Coders need love too.![]() |
Bot Operator's Barnstar | |
put your message here. ~~~~ |