User:Mathbot

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I am smarter than I look.
I am smarter than I look.

This bot is operated by Oleg Alexandrov. Please write any comments about this bot on his talk page. See the contributions by this bot.

Mathbot stands for mathematics articles tireless helper (and bot).

Contents

[edit] Mathematical work

[edit] List of mathematics articles

Oleg Alexandrov is awarded the Barnstar of Diligence for really useful Mathbot. --Latinus (talk (el:)) 22:57, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Oleg Alexandrov is awarded the Barnstar of Diligence for really useful Mathbot. --Latinus (talk (el:)) 22:57, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot goes every day through the list of mathematics categories looking for new mathematics and mathematician biography articles, which it appends to the list of mathematics articles and respectively the list of mathematicians. See the changes to the list of mathematics articles by day.

Mathbot is able to search for new math categories which, with some input from bot's boss, it then adds to the list of mathematics categories.

The bot also makes a list of mathematician articles that changed in the last 24 hours and downloads a copy of those to my computer. That information is used to update the dates of birth/death and country information for people in the list of mathematicians.

[edit] Recent changes to mathematics articles

Mathbot helps track the recent changes to mathematics articles (this can be useful for monitoring purposes and against vandalism). This is accomplished with mathbot's recent changes script, also available from the list of mathematics articles.

[edit] Missing science topics

The Tireless Contributor Barnstar Awarded to Mathbot for his tireless editing day and night, his invaluable contributions to WikiProjects and Wikipedia 1.0, and for his diligent avoidance of 3RR, trolling and flame wars. --kingboyk 12:23, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
The Tireless Contributor Barnstar Awarded to Mathbot for his tireless editing day and night, his invaluable contributions to WikiProjects and Wikipedia 1.0, and for his diligent avoidance of 3RR, trolling and flame wars. --kingboyk 12:23, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Mathbot maintains the mathematics lists at the missing science topics project. It uses various sources to add to the lists of mathematical topics missing from Wikipedia, and it removes the topics which got created. Mathbot is able to suggest potential redirects by comparing the names of missing topics with the names of existing topics. This is done using approximate string matching, and so far resulted in around 750 redirects being created.

[edit] Other mathematical

Mathbot suggests entries missing from lists of articles, see talk:list of numerical analysis topics for an example. It keeps the tables at the PlanetMath Exchange project up-to-date. Periodically it generates a list of mathematical redlinks. It also maintains a list of most linked math articles.

[edit] Nonmathematical

Taking a cue from his boss that nowadays one can be good at math and starve, mathbot has tried to diversify. It turns out that knowing how to count can bring one a long way, and so mathbot's skills are in demand. :) Here are the tasks mathbot is or was doing.

In recognition for his work, mathbot got nominated for administrator on April Fools' Day 2006.

[edit] What makes mathbot tick?

Mathbot is a collection of scripts written in Perl. It uses the Perlwikipedia package to communicate with Wikipedia (older codes use WWW::Mediawiki::Client instead). The source code for the scripts updating the list of mathematics articles and list of mathematicians is available at mathbot's svn repository on Google Code (gradually, the codes for the other jobs will be added also).

[edit] External links