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Wikipedia:Bot policy

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Moribunt (talk | contribs) at 17:43, 29 July 2005 (→Currently running bots: +MoriBot). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Bots are automatic processes interacting with Wikipedia over the World Wide Web. 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 types of bots and history of Wikipedia bots. Well-designed bots can provide concrete benefits to the Wikipedia project, but even good bots have some drawbacks.

Current policy on running bots

Before running a bot, you must get approval on Wikipedia talk:Bots. 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 m:requests for permissions.

  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. There should be no (unattended) spelling fixing bots; it is quite simply not technically possible to create such a bot that will not make incorrect changes.
  5. 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
  6. 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.

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 made 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.

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 Ram-Man's 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.

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", or just "clueless-bots". A bot running out of control could potentially cause heavy server load or even a denial of service attack.

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 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.

Currently running bots


Bots running without a flag

These bots are run manually, under direct user control, without a bot flag so that they appear in Special: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 Wikipedia talk:Bots or to the owner of that bot.

Other registered bots

  • User:The Anomebot has been created for automated submissions by User:The Anome. The initial intent is to upload approximately 5000 map diagrams created by User: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

See also

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