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Robots or bots are automatic processes interacting with Wikipedia over the World Wide Web. Wikipedia Policies and guidelines discourages the use of bots. Please read the guidelines below before designing and implementing any bot on Wikipedia.

We almost always prefer 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 them: see Types of bots and History of Wikipedia bots. Well-designed bots can provide concrete benefits to the Wikipedia project, but even good ones have some drawbacks.

This is not the page to request a bot.

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

Current policy on running bots

Before running a bot, you must get approval on Bots/Requests for approvals (more instructions are there). State there precisely what the bot will do, observe the discussion, and await authorization from someone in the Bots/Approvals group. Approval may take up to one week. After approval you may run the bot for a short period so it can be monitored. After the trial the bot will be evaluated by someone in the approvals group and you may ask that the user be marked as a bot by a Bureaucrats.

Please DO NOT start running your bot without:

  1. Creating a talk page for the bot, describing its functions
  2. Listing it on Bots/Requests for approvals
  3. Getting the go-ahead from someone in the Bots/Approvals group

When seeking approval on Bots/Requests for approvals, please state the following:

  1. Whether the bot is manually assisted (run by a human) or automatically scheduled to run
  2. The period, if any, we should expect it to run
  3. What language or program it is running
  4. Its purpose
    • Why you need it
    • Whether it is important enough for Wikipedia to permit it

Create a user page for your bot before seeking approval on Bots/Requests for approvals:

  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 its user page to Category:Wikipedia bots

When naming your bot, please make sure that it is not the same as your username, and that a person can immediately determine that it is a bot.

  1. Blocking policy, without hesitation, if they are unapproved, doing something the operator did not 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 they should wait 30-60 seconds between edits. After being accepted and a Bureaucrats 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, otherwise 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 when replying to people. Questions or concerns can be addressed at bot's talk page or the operator's talk page, but the one responsible for replying is the operator not the bot.

The burden of proof is on the bot-maker to demonstrate that the bot:

  1. is harmless
  2. is useful
  3. is not a server hog
  4. has been approved

Note that according to Categorization of people#When assigning categories to articles on 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.

To help prove that a bot is harmless and useful, a trial period may be asked to demonstrate the bot. Any complaints made about the bot during the trial period require that the bot be stopped immediately, and the issue should be resolved at Bots. If the trial period passes with no problems, a bot flag may be requested at RBF.

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

Under exceptional circumstances, one or more aspects of this policy may be set aside by a consensus of Administrators.

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 that would not make mistakes. Manually-assisted spell bots are acceptable, so long as they include international spellchecking and not only country-specific spellchecking. Statistic-generating spell-checking bots, which generate statistics on common misspellings, are also acceptable.

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

Interwiki bots

If using the pywikipedia framework:

  • Please run the latest version
  • Update on a daily basis

Bot operators must be reasonably familiar with the languages that they are linking from and to, in order to confirm that interwiki linkings between the two encyclopedias are done correctly.

Exceptions to this are bot developers, those working very closely with bot developers, or users that have proven themselves as harmless and useful to the community.

Problems with a specific bot

If you spot a problem or have a complaint about a specific bot, take your query to the bot operator's talk page. If you think the problem is serious and would like greater input, leave a short note at Bots pointing to the discussion at the operator's talk page. An admin can block on sight any bot that appears to be out of control.

Benefits and drawbacks

Note that this section specifically discusses the type of bot that, like Rambot, adds large numbers of similarly-formatted articles based on some external data source.

Benefits bots can offer

  • Provides a good template of pre-formatted data for contributors (see how the Newton, Massachusetts entry has been expanded; the Periodic table was used to start the 100+ articles for the elements)
  • Potentially provides a unique resource not directly available elsewhere on the web (the small-town bot is a good example of a well-designed bot—see Rambot description of the data acquisition process—uck!)
  • Provides full coverage in cases where an a priori undeterminable subset of the data has a high likelihood of being (or becoming) interesting even though a randomly chosen entry has a low probability of being interesting / useful.
  • Can perform chores that might become tedious for a human, such as uploading a large series of images. The Anomebot is the first bot with this capability.
  • Fix common errors.
  • Create a uniformity of style.

Inherent drawbacks of using bots in current system

  • Adds tens of thousands of entries to Wikipedia that are unlikely to see a human edit any time soon (in fact, we could probably extrapolate the nearly exact rate at which they will get edited by seeing how many have been edited so far).
  • Artificially inflates the perceived activity of Wikipedia.
  • Can be perceived as tilting (and possibly could tilt) the purpose of Wikipedia away from being an encyclopedia and towards being a gazetteer / Sports Trivia Reference / etc.
  • Danger of abuse by "vandal-bots" (though the owner of a vandal bot would be unlikely to follow policy on whether bots were allowed anyway), or just "clueless-bots". A bot running out of control could potentially cause heavy server load or even a denial of service attack.
  • Inability to detect vandalism in previous, recent edits, effectively concealing these edits from users' watchlists. (though this can also happen if a human edits the page and doesn't spot the vandalism)

These pros and cons apply to bot additions in the aggregate—individual bot entries raise issues similar to those of stub entries. In fact, they're often one and the same.

Any graceful solution would provide the automatic functionality of the pros without the negative consequences of the cons.

Bots and the Recent changes page

There have been complaints about interference with normal contributor operations, especially 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. A similar function applies to your watchlist.

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.

Bots with a flag

Bots that are in this list should also appear in Listusers/Bot.

Various tasks

Maintenance-related Bots
Bots listed here are used in the assistance of page maintenance.

Disambiguation Bots
Bots listed below are used solely for disambiguation.

Interwiki Bots
Bots listed below are used solely for interwiki linking.
Name Purpose Owner Date added Status
Beastie Bot Species: Conservation Status and IUCN References Pengo 2006-06-06
Bluebot Recategorising, Template substitution, various tasks. Bluemoose 2005-11-12
CanisRufus Disambiguation, Categories for discussion tasks. RedWolf
CmdrObot Human-assisted. Spelling, punctuation, capitalisation fixes, compacting external URLs, miscellaneous tasks. Cmdrjameson 2006-03-14
CricketBot Human-assisted, corrects common errors in cricket articles. Stephen Turner 2005-12-13
Cydebot Template and category maintenance per Templates for deletion, Stub types for deletion, and Categories for discussion. Cyde 2006-04-30
CyeZBot Multi-login, adds interwiki links, various tasks. CyeZ
DcoetzeeBot Disambiguation, redirect bypassing, category moving. Deco 2005-09-06
D6 Disambiguation, categories, various tasks. Docu
Drinibot Creating capitalization redirects, substing templates Drini 2006-04-20
Fetofsbot Orphans images. Fetofs 2006-02-21
Fetofsbot2 Semi-automated disambiguation, double redirect, substing and other general fixes. Fetofs 2006-02-21
Fluxbot Mostly processes Categories for discussion/Speedy; German userbox solution; Fixing non Template substitution templates. Xaosflux 2006-06-12
Gdrbot Bypasses redirects, Disambiguation, recategorisation, Gdr/DYKbot, Gdr/Nomialbot, Gdr/Yearbot, various tasks. Gdr 2005-05-18
Guanabot Guanaco
Grammarbot R3m0t 2005-03-04
Janna Anthony DiPierro
JdforresterBot Moves pages and fixes the resultant redirects. Jdforrester 2005-04-12
KaiserbBot Disambiguation, re-categorisation, and redirect bypassing. Kaiserb 2005-12-20
KevinBot Changes race and ethnicity links in Rambot articles, various tasks. Kevin Rector
LinkBot Suggests possible wikilinks. Nickj
LupinBot Uploaders images. Lupin 2005-05-07
MBot Mbecker 2005-04-18
MiszaBot 1. Delivers the Esperanza Newsletter. 2. Archives my talk page. Misza13 2006-03-19
Nobot Maintains municipality and county articles under WikiProject Norway. Egil
NohatBot Various tasks. Nohat
OrphanBot Removes unsourced or unknown-license images from articles. Carnildo 2006-01-13
Pathosbot Template conversion, Template substitution, various tasks. Pathoschild 2006-03-13
Pearle Open source, various tasks. Beland
Pegasusbot Pywikipedia, substing of templates and various other tasks Pegasus1138 2006-03-23
Rambot Adds and maintains county and city articles, human-assisted spelling. Ram-Man
Robbot Human-assisted Disambiguation, adds interwiki links. Andre Engels
RobotG Implements CFD consensus; implements s. RobertG 2006-07-14
Rschen7754bot Various highway-related tasks. Rschen7754 2005-11-06
RussBot Fixes double-redirects, disambiguation, updates Disambiguation pages maintenance. RussBlau 2005-11-05
Sethbot Creates redirects to American place names. Seth Ilys
Snobot Uploads images, fixes redirects. Snoyes
StefanBot Adds fishbase and ITIS references to fish articles and adds conservation status to taxoboxes. Stefan 2005-12-31
Topjabot Gerritholl
Tsca.bot Bypasses redirects. Tsca
UgenBot Human-assisted disambiguation, fixes interwiki links Ugen64
VandalCountBot Updates vandalism statistics. Lightdarkness 2006-01-24
VFD Bot Various Articles for deletion tasks. AllyUnion 2005-03-05
WatchlistBot Manage project watchlists (see user page for details) Mom2jandk 2006-03-19
Werdnabot Archives User talk pages, bypasses double-redirects, maintains Werdna648/.NET Bot Framework. Werdna648 2006-06-04
Whobot Categories for discussion bot for moving articles Who 2005-10-13
WinBot Unicodifying, SUBST Winhunter 2006-07-14
Tawkerbot subst'ing / blanking stale ip talk pages (per discussion). Tawker 2006-02-23
MessedRobot Fixing double redirects, replaces uses of redundant images, recategorization Messedrocker unknown
Ganeshbot Creates stubs of Indian cities. Ganeshk 2006-03-24
Name Purpose Owner Date added Status
AFD Bot Taking over VFD Bot's job due to name change. AllyUnion 2005-09-01
Alphachimpbot Filing articles from Wikipedia cleanup into month specific categories, subst's user talk templates. Runs 1-2 times/day. Alphachimp 2006-07-07
DFBot Maintains the Dragons flight/RFA summary and Dragons flight/AFD summary. Dragons flight 2006-04-25
Dlyons493Bot Routine maintenance of the 342 articles on French arrondissements. Run manually occasionally as needed. Dlyons493 2005-12-01
JoeBot Finds commonly misspelled words and corrects them, user-assisted at all times. Pays special attention not to change regional spellings. JoeSmack 2006-02-27
LDBot Has taken over automated tasks of Articles for deletion. Lightdarkness 2006-02-24
Mairibot Using pywikipedia for Stub types for deletion renames. Mairi 2005-11-05
NekoDaemon CFD Bot. AllyUnion 2005-04-18
Pfft Bot Occasionally moves images to commons semi-automatically. Phroziac 2005-12-28
Sandbot A bot that uses the pywikipedia framework so it can clean up the main sandbox and main sandbox talk page every 6 hours; Also cleans all tutorial sandboxes and tutorial sandbox talk pages every Monday. Work for additional sandboxes may be requested with the Bot owner. AllyUnion 2005-03-05
Syrcatbot Attended bot using AutoWikiBrowser to assist in recategorization / category emptying at Categories for discussion. Syrthiss 2006-02-05
TPO-bot Manually run bot to assist with Stub types for deletion. TheParanoidOne 2005-12-27
VoABot Updating the full, semi, move, and the other protected pages lists at List of protected pages. Cleans up Requests for page protection. Notifies admins who protect certain pages without a summary. Voice of All 2006-05-16
Zorglbot Copyright problems automated tasks. Schutz 2006-05-18
Name Purpose Owner Date added Status
ABot Disambiguation. ABCD 2005-08-06
Commander Keane bot Disambiguation. Commander Keane 2005-10-15
DisambigBot Disambiguation. Robchurch 2005-08-27
Margosbot Interwiki links (from ). Margospl 2005-05-05
WouterBot Disambiguation. WouterVH 2005-05-04
Pfft Bot Disambiguation. Phroziac 2005-12-28
Name Notes Owner Date added Status
Chobot With . ChongDae 2005-06-20
FlaBot Interwiki-Link-Checker User:Flacus 2005-05-01
Jumbuck none. Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 2004-10-14
M7bot With . M7it 2005-09-07
MalafayaBot With . Malafaya 2005-11-04
Maksim-bot With . Maksim-e 2005-12-17 waiting for approval
RoboDick Multilogon bot. User:Dutchy-Dick 2006-02-01
RobotE none. Ellywa 2005-10-20
RobotJcb Multi-logon bot. Jcbos 2005-10-16
SashatoBot none. Sasa Stefanovic 2006-01-16
Ugur Basak Bot Multilogin bot, with . Ugur Basak 2006-02-08
Vina-iwbot Multilogin bot, , and Vina 2006-06-17
YurikBot Multilogin bot, ~90 languages. Yurik 2005-03-14
ZwoBot none. Head 2005-07-14

Bots running with administrator rights

Bots listed here operate on accounts with Administrator rights.
  1. Detects page moves occuring more often than a certain rate threshold, issues an indefinite block and posts a notice at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.
  2. Detects page moves to certain bad faith targets as vandalism. Reverts the move and deletes the redirect.
  3. Indefinitely blocks newly created accounts with names containing certain banned words and phrases, or that use certain special characters. Block summary is "user..."
  4. Detects certain behaviors as vandalism and automatically uses rollback.
  5. Decides that some of the automatically detected vandalism warrants a block summarized as "vandalism". Users triggering this are blocked indefinitely. Ordinary IPs are blocked for 24 hours and AOL IPs for 15 minutes.
Unknown
Name Purpose Owner Date added Status
Curps Curps (operator uses same account as bot) 2005-09-26
Marudubshinki Marudubshinki Unknown

Bots running without a flag

These bots are run manually, under direct user control, without a bot flag so that they appear in Recentchanges. Bots listed here should only be making edits 30-60 seconds apart until fully approved. Discussion related to these bots should be directed to the talk page at Bots or to the owner of that bot.

Name Purpose Owner Date added Status
79 androids Maintains templates related to WikiProject Baseball players. Android79 2006-01-05
Afkbot Interwikis Korean alpha for knowledge 2006-02-15
Andrewbot Runs Pywikipedia redirect.py. Andrew_pmk 2005-08-16
AngBot Deletes articles created by mass page-creation vandalism. Angela
Atomobot Various tasks. Atomique 2006-03-18
AzaBot Template subst, touching for mergin and/or deleting of templates, search and replace. AzaToth 2005-12-07
Catapult Freakofnurture/Catapult Freakofnurture 2006-02-13
Crypticbot Lists orphaned Articles for deletion pages and automated archival. Cryptic 2005-10-29
Curpsbot-unicodify Converts some Help:Special characters into Unicode characters. Curps 2005-08-22
Diderobot Fixes spelling and syntax, various other tasks. Sam Hocevar 2005-04-21
Erwin85Bot Disambiguation, redirects, etc. Erwin85 2006-06-24
Eubot Updates statistics on Dutch municipalities. Eugene van der Pijll 2005-04-08
FairuseBot Removal of disputed fair-use images from articles Carnildo 2006-04-01
G-Bot Semi-automated typo correction, disambiguates links, various other tasks. Gflores 2006-01-12
Gnome (Bot) Stub sorting in support of WikiProject Novels Is waiting for permission for debug. Info on Bots Eagle 101 (Eagle 101) (Eagle 101/Desk) 2006-03-05
Guanabot2 RC patrol edits. Guanaco 2005-03-13
IsraBot Uploads stubs on Israeli cities. AdamRaizen
Kakashi Bot Responds to bot requests. AllyUnion 2005-02-25
Kurando-san Human-assisted archival. AllyUnion 2005-03-30
Ligulembot Human-assisted, exchanges template calls and updates lists of templates in articles Ligulem 2006-01-27
Bot-maru Mostly disambiguation, or really, whatever Pywikipedia can do and I feel like. Marudubshinki 2006-05-10
Matt Crypto (bot) Maintains List of cryptography topics, various other tasks. Matt Crypto 2005-02-24
MediationBot Various tasks as needed by the MC, including RFM case management and Medcom notifications. Essjay
(Chairman) 		2006-07-12
Mgmbot Semi-automates 'Did you know?' updates. MacGyverMagic 2005-06-26
N-Bot Replaces links to redirects to lists (of fictional characters, for instance) with links to the appropriate list section. Nickptar 2005-08-06
NetBot unspecified. Anthere 2005-03-01
NotificationBot Semi-automates talk messages. AllyUnion 2005-09-15
Pfft Bot Solves disambiguations and moves images to commons. Phroziac 2005-12-28
PhD-Econobot Disambiguates links to Native Americans. Nat Krause 2005-10-11
RefBot Processes references and citations. SEWilco 2005-12-23
Roomba Copyright-related media tagging. Gmaxwell 2005-11-06
RoryBot Bypassing deprecated redirects (e.g. article-to-project space). Rory096 2006-05-26
SecuniBot Updates security statistics on Comparison of operating systems. Sperling 2005-07-25
SEWilcoBot Various tasks. SEWilco 2005-06-19
SmackBot Makes simple or complex repetitive text changes. MoS, requests. Rich Farmbrough 2006-02-01
SuggestBot Recommends articles to edit based on articles people have edited previously. ForteTuba 2006-01-03
Tawkerbot2, Tawkerbot4, AntiVandalBot, Xenophon (bot), Werdnabot2, SgtDrini Automatic vandalism revision / warnings. See its user page for info / FAQ's Tawker 2006-03-05
Tractor Open-community IRC bot under development for New contributors' help page
WdefconBot Monitoring and maintenance of through the #vandalism-en-wp IRC channel. Misza13 2006-07-16
WOPR Adjusts DEFCON based on RC output. Cool Cat 2005-10-10
Wybot unspecified. WonYong 2005-12-21
none Checks open proxies (Fvw/POPBot). Fvw 2005-09-30
none Semi-automates 'Did you know?' updates (Gdr/DYKbot). Gdr 2005-05-29
none unspecified. Alterego 2005-06-26
none Various tasks (IByte/Bot). IByte 2005-07-16
none Runs Pywikipedia editarticle.py. Shawn K. Quinn 2005-07-19
none ''unspecified (Pywikipedia). Bmicomp 2005-07-20
none Semi-automates Articles for deletions. Ceejayoz 2005-10-25
ZsinjBot Templete substitution Zsinj 2006-03-28

Interwiki bots

Other registered bots

  • The Anomebot was created for automated submissions by The Anome. The initial intent was to upload approximately 5000 map diagrams created by Wapcaplet. This has now been done, and new uses are now being thought of for the Anomebot.

Software which may be useful for making bots

Wiki integration bots

Below is a list of bots on other systems/solutions that extend system-specific funcionallity with Wiki integrations.
  • Wikibot auto links 'wikitagged' words in Joomla contents with Wikipedia.

See also

Wikipedia bots

Wikipedia:Bötli | ويكيبيديا:بوت | Уикипедия:Бот | Viquipèdia:Bots | Wikipedie:Bot | Wikipedia:Bots | Βικιπαίδεια:Bots | Wikipedia:Bot | Vikipedio:Roboto | Wikipedia:Bot-ak | ویکی‌پدیا:اتحادیهٔ کارگری ربات‌ها | Wikipédia:Bot | Wikipedia:Bots | 위키백과:봇 | Wikipedia:Bot | Wikipedia:Bot | ויקיפדיה:בוט | Wikipedia:Bot | Vicipaedia:Bot | Wikipedia:Bot | Wikipedia:Botai | Wikipedia:Bot | Wikipédia:Botok | Wikipedia:Bot | Wikipedia:Бот | Wikipedia:Bots | Wikipedia:Bot | Wikipedia:Roboter | Wikipedia:Bots | Wikipedia:Boty | Wikipedia:Coordenação robótica | Wikipedia:Bot | Википедия:Бот | Wikipedia:Bots | Wikipédia:Bot | Wikipedija:Boti | Википедија:Ботови | Wikipedia:Botit | Wikipedia:Robotar | Wikipedia:Bot | วิกิพีเดีย:บอต | Wikipedia:Robot | Vikipedi:Botlar | Довідка:Роботи | Help:机器人

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Wikipedia:Bots".

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