Wikipedia talk:Bot requests

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Contents 1 WikiProject help desk 2 How to write a bot 3 Archiving 4 No bot despite wide support? 5 Wikipedia Day Awards

[edit] WikiProject help desk

After reading the bot requests it seems to me that there is a nice division here between what the WikiProject help desk is doing and what this page does. I noticed there are many intricacies that must be dealt with when doing stuff like applying regular expressions to the entire Wikipedia. As such I have placed a rule on that WikiProject that states that all changes suggested by a program will be approved by a human. This eliminates systematic changing of the entire Wikipedia, a domain which this page seems much better at. However if you see any requests come through here for one-off tasks, or tasks that only apply to a few articles, then send them over to the help desk; that way you can focus your attention on the subtle details of not destroying the entire Wikipedia with a crazed bot =). Triddle 16:53, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] How to write a bot

I'm skilled programmer and have a good idea for a bot, but instead of requesting a bot, I'd like to write one myself. I downloaded pywikipedia but failed to find any documentation. Where can I find a manual or a howto on how to write a bot? --Dijxtra 13:49, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

There does not seam to be any good documentation. I have done the same since December and I managed to write abot and it works. The best places to look is at [1] and [2] none very helpful I'm afraid. What I did was to take the replace.py bot and rewrote that, its functionallity is very simple, just do a regexp replace, so take that code, look through it, find the replace function, from there you should be able to get a idea on how the bot works, and write your own code at that place. now you have the whole environment and gets lots of code for free, like doing the edit on one page, on a category, from a list and so on. Hope this helps. Stefan 11:50, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I found pywikipediabot's source code to be unnecessarily opaque. If you speak Perl, however, the source for Beland's bot Pearle is quite clear and expandable. —Cryptic (talk) 11:04, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I respectfully disagree. Having no prior knowledge of either language, I found Python much easier to learn than Perl. — Feb. 21, '06 [11:35] <freakofnur_xture|talk>

Er, a comparison of python to perl isn't really on-subject (though I do agree that the former is easier to learn). My point is that, if you already know the language, the source code for User:Pearle is much more accessible than that of pywikipediabot. That's why I said "If you speak Perl" above. —Cryptic (talk) 17:53, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Archiving

Taking a look at this page, I notice there are a number of requests that are at least a month old (and by old, I mean, the discussion has been dead a month, not just that it was started a month ago). I'm wondering if perhaps an archival is in order, and if so, if there would be interested in having the lovely EssjayBot_II (talk • contribs) to archive requests after the discussion has been dead for say, 30 days. Thoughts? Essjay (Talk) 07:19, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd support the idea. fetofs ^Hello! 13:27, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm all for it. It's safe to guess that threads beyond 30 days are probably dead. alphaChimp ^laudare 14:10, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Talking of archiving, werdnabot has wiped the whole page ([3]). I'm reverting now (shouldn't harm the program - also reverting the archive), beacse the 14 day interval hadn't passed for lots of those threads. Just an FYI :) Martinp23 16:25, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah werdnabot has gone crazy. Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 16:35, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Ah yes - just saw :O Martinp23 18:04, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] No bot despite wide support?

Re: Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_8#New_articles_bot... is nobody going to make a bot for us?-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  20:53, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I dont have the ability for that kind of task. apparantly no one else can either. sorry Betacommand ^{(talk • contribs • Bot)} 22:00, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd be glad to assist you, if we could hash out the algorithm a bit better. How would the bot know when an article is new? Where would it look? To be honest, This just doesn't seem possible without having a bot scan recent changes, or without sql access to perform a query to list all articles created on a specific date. Using whatlinkshere can only go so far. --Jmax- 22:16, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

How would the bot know when article is new? Can you tell the bot to start from the end or what links here till it finds the last article reported on this page, and then have it start from that point? I believe User:Mathbot does something similar, when it checks for articles in categories but not linked on pages - here the bot has to check the what links here insteadof a cat.-- _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk}  21:28, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

That is very vague. Perhaps you should re-create your request, and be more precise on your goal and possible implementations -- Jmax- 10:06, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 20:00, 30 December 2006 (UTC)