This page in a nutshell: On Wikipedia,bots are computer-controlled user accounts performing various tasks in order to maintain the encyclopedia. Bots are used for many purposes, for instance, removing obvious vandalism and archiving talk pages. All bots must beapproved bya special group before they are put into use.
A physical robot (right)
Abot (a common nickname forsoftware robot) is an automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain the64,492,092 pages of the English Wikipedia. Bots are able to make edits very rapidly, but can disrupt Wikipedia if they are incorrectly designed or operated. For these reasons, abot policy has been developed.
There are currently 2,789bot tasks approved for use on the English Wikipedia; however, not all approved tasks involve actively carrying out edits. Bots will leave messages on user talk pages if the action that the bot has carried out is of interest to that editor. Some bots can be excluded from leaving these messages by using the{{bots}} tags. There are 215 exclusion-compliant bots, which are listed inthis category. There are303 bots flagged with the "bot" flag right now (and over 400former bots). There is also a range oftools that allow semi-automated editing of large numbers of articles.
Bots have been used in the past to create large numbers of articles that were uploaded to Wikipedia within a short timeframe. Some technical problems were experienced and this led to the formulation of a bot policy, as well as arestriction on the automated, large-scale, creation of articles.
The Bot Approvals Group (BAG) supervises and approves all bot-related activity from a technical and quality-control perspective on behalf of the English Wikipedia community. On the English Wikipedia, the right toflag a bot is limited tobureaucrats.
Some programming experience generally is needed to create a bot, and knowledge ofregular expressions is useful for many editing tasks. However, some of the more user-friendly tools, such asAutoWikiBrowser orJavaScript Wiki Browser, can be used for some tasks.
The Chicken Scheme, Common Lisp, Haskell, Java, Microsoft .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby programming languages all have libraries available for creating bots.Pywikibot is a commonly used Python package developed specifically for creating MediaWiki bots.
If you have noticed a problem with a bot, have a complaint, or have a suggestion to make, you should contact the bot operator directly via their user talk page (or via the bot account's talk page). Bot operatorsare expected to be responsive to the community's concerns and suggestions, but pleaseassume good faith anddon't panic. Bugs and mistakes happen, andwe're all here to build an encyclopedia.
If the bot is causing a significant problem, or the bot operator has not responded and the bot is still causing issues, several mechanisms are available to prevent further disruption. Many bots provide astop button or means to disable the problematic task on their bot user page. This should be tried first, followed by a discussion of the issue with the bot operator. If no such mechanism is available (or if urgent action is needed), leave a message at theadministrators' noticeboard requesting a block for a malfunctioning bot. Per the noticeboard's guideline, you are required to notify the bot operator of the discussion taking place at the noticeboard.
While it is easy tohide all bots from your watchlist, there is no way of hiding specific bots through user preferences or default watchlist settings. However, it is possible with auser script by following these steps.
Go toSpecial:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc, check both the 'Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist' and 'Use non-JavaScript interface' boxes, and click 'Save'.
Go to your watchlist. There should be a box with several options. Tick the 'Enable hide user buttons' box. This will let you hide specific bots (and users) from your watchlist.
Note: You might want to untick the 'Enable hide user buttons' box after you ignore a bot to ensure that you don't accidentally click 'hide user' when browsing your watchlist.
If you want to show the box again, for example to reset your ignore list, go to yourSpecial:MyPage/common.css page and remove the line you added in optional step #1 (remembering to againbypass your browser's cache). Redoing optional steps #1 and #2 will hide the box again.
While you are completely free to ignore any bots (or users) you want, it is a good idea to only ignore bots with well-defined tasks, which you trust to not make any mistakes.
There is no way of hidingAutoWikiBrowser (AWB) edits through user preferences or default watchlist settings. However, it is possible with auser script by following these steps:
Any edit with "AWB" in its edit summary will now default to hidden for you. You may reveal them by clicking on the "show AWB" tab at the top of your watchlist (next to "Special page" for Monobook skin, or in the "More" dropdown for Vector skin).
Notes:
If you leave outvarawbHiddenByDefault=true;, AWB edits will be shown by default, but you will have the option of hiding AWB edits by clicking on the "hide AWB" tab at the top of your watchlist.
While you are completely free to ignore AWB edits, remember that many of them will contain substantial changes from human editors, not justminor edits from bots ormeatbots.
When hiding edits with a script, earlier edits can be forced to appear. Using theExpand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recentpreference option is necessary to see other non-hidden watchlist hits for a page.
How to stop specific bots from editing the article
It's rare that a mainspace article needs to not be edited by a specific bot. No article needs to stop all bots from editing, since antivandal bots such asClueBot NG need to be able to edit all mainspace articles. The template{{bots}} can stop a bot from editing an article under the rare circumstance it's needed.
