Wookieepedia:Bots

Droids also known formerly as bots are automatic processes interacting with a wiki. As Wikipedia policy discourages the use of bots, please read the guidelines below before designing and implementing any bot on Wikipedia.

We almost always prefer to rely on human input for editing, and only carefully designed bots are allowed. While bots are capable of doing a lot of work, they strain the system's ability to keep up, both technically and intellectually. Bots could be used to add to or generate articles, while others could be used to edit or even destroy articles: see the types of bots and history of Wikipedia bots pages on Wikipedia. Well-designed bots can provide concrete benefits to the Wikipedia project, but even good bots have some drawbacks.

This is not the page to request a droid.

This page contains information pertinent to running a droid yourself. To request that someone write a droid to do something, please see Bot requests instead.

To see the benefits and drawbacks of using bots, refer to Wikipedia:Bots.

The exact terms of running bots are still being elaborated. Please discuss the matter on the talk page.

Current policy on running bots (copied from Wikipedia)
Before running a bot, you must get approval on Wookieepedia talk:Droids. State there precisely what the bot will do. Get a rough consensus on the talk page that it is a good idea. Wait a week to see if there are any objections, and if there aren't, go ahead and run it for a short period so it can be monitored. After this period, you should ask that the user be marked as a bot at requests for permissions.

When getting approval on Wookieepedia talk:Droids, please state the following:
 * 1) Whether the bot is manually assisted (run by a human) or automatic scheduled to run
 * 2) The period, if any, we should expect it to run
 * 3) What language or program it is running
 * 4) The purpose of your bot
 * 5) * Why do you need it?
 * 6) * Is it important enough for the Wookieepedia to allow your bot?

Make certain to create a user page for your bot before getting approval on Wookieepedia talk:Droids:
 * 1) Describe the bot's purpose, language it uses, what program(s) it uses (pywikipedia framework, etc)
 * 2) Describe whether it is manually assisted or automatically scheduled to run
 * 3) The period, if any, we should expect it to run
 * 4) Describe who the maintainer is
 * 5) Add the bot's user page to Category:Bots

When naming your bot, please make sure that it does not look exactly like your username, and that a person can immediately determine that it is a bot.


 * 1) Sysops should block bots, without hesitation, if they are unapproved, doing something the operator didn't say they would do, messing up articles or editing too rapidly.
 * 2) New bots should run without a bot flag so people can check what it's doing.
 * 3) Until new bots are accepted as ok they should wait 30-60 seconds between edits. After being accepted and a steward has marked them as a bot, they should delay approximately 10 seconds between edits. It is recommended that bots run with larger delays during peak hours and peak days such as Monday. Ideally, bots should run on off-peak hours and on typically low traffic days such as Friday and Saturday to avoid strain on the database servers. Running during off-peak times may permit faster editing than suggested.
 * 4) The operator should be at, or logged into, the machine the bot is running on to terminate it if necessary during the debugging phase, or the bot is liable to be blocked without notice.
 * 5) If you are planning to use a "spider", recursive wget, or similar software to get a local copy of wikipedia, please download the database dumps instead.
 * 6) Dynamic loading of Wikipedia pages may also be unacceptable. Please see Mirrors and forks.
 * 7) Operators should separate their edits from their bot. This means that you should not be logged in as your bot replying to people.  Questions or concerns can be addressed at bot's talk page or the operator's talk page, but the one who is responsible for replying is the operator not the bot.

The burden of proof is on the bot-maker to demonstrate the following:
 * 1) The bot is harmless
 * 2) The bot is useful
 * 3) The bot is not a server hog
 * 4) The bot has been approved

Note that according to Wikipedia:Categorization of people certain types of person categories should not be filled/emptied using a bot. Before adding sensitive categories to articles by bot, the input should be manually checked article by article, rather than uploaded from an existing list in Wikipedia.

In the assistance to prove the bot is harmless and useful, a trial period may be asked to demonstrate the bot. Complaints made about the bot during the trial period requires the bot to be immediately stopped, and the issue should be resolved at Wookieepedia talk:Droids. If the trial period passes with no problems, then a bot flag may be requested at requests for permissions.

If you plan to make any modifications to your bot, which expand the scope of its original purpose, please leave a note on the talk page regarding the nature of the change. This is to assert that no one has any problems with your bot, and such additions still make the bot harmless, useful, and not a server hog.

Spell-checking bots
There should be no bots that attempt to fix spelling mistakes in an unattended fashion. It is not technically possible to create such a bot which would not make mistakes. Manually-assisted spell bots are perfectly acceptable, so long as they include international spellchecking and not US-only English spellchecking. Statistic generating spell-checking bots are also perfectly acceptable (bots that generate statistics on common misspellings).

Maintenance reports which list possible misspellings are welcome. See Typo for existing efforts and a list of existing interactive spell-checking tools.

Bots and recent changes
There have been general complaints about interference with normal contributor operations, esp. Special:Recentchanges.

In response to popular demand, a feature has been added to hide edits by registered bots from display in Recentchanges; see the list below for active bots. To include bot edits in Recentchanges, [ manually add hidebots=0 to your query string], or click "show bot edits" at the top of Recentchanges.

Good form
Bot operators are encouraged, but not required to:
 * Publish the source code of their bot (unless it's a clone)
 * Program their bot to stop editing if someone leaves a message on its talk page. This can be checked by looking for the "You have new messages..." banner in the HTML for the edit form.

Currently running bots
This is a list of currently running bots. Some of these may be actual users who are running bot scripts under their own account, and are not planning to apply for a bot flag.


 * User:R2-D2 - mass actions for minor maintenance, like renaming categories or keeping templates uniform (run manually)
 * User:C-3PO - maintenance droid