Warcraft Wiki:Wiki bots

Wiki bots are scripts that edit the wiki in a semi-automated or fully-automated manner. This includes regular users running a batch script to apply a change to many pages, but it can also mean an automated script that keeps doing the same thing over and over again according to a schedule.

Examples:

• AutoWikiBrowser
• pywikipediabot
• Mikk has a few on User:Mikk/Scripts

"Bot" tag

Bureaucrat admins can tag a user account as a "bot". This adds the user to the "Bots" user rights management group in Warcraft Wiki.

Edits by such accounts can be hidden in the lists of recent changes, which can help reduce the amount of work needed by the RC Patrol.

• List of Warcraft Wiki accounts tagged as bots

Regular user accounts are never tagged as bots, even if some of them do more editing than some of our bot scripts. Only secondary accounts are bot tagged, c.f. Mikk vs Mikkbot. They do not need to have "bot" in their names, but we do encourage it.

Please do not use bot software or perform bot actions on an account which is not flagged as a bot.

Requesting bot-assisted changes

If certain changes you have done (such as changes to a Template) require massive repetitive edits on the wiki and you think they can be done by a bot but you don't have the possibility to do this yourself, you can add a request on Project:Bot requests. Eventually, a user with the necessary knowledge will run a bot to match the request.

Please note that bot owners are in no way (and should not be) forced to do such work and are doing it only if they want to. Requesting a bot to run is not always possible either, due to the program's/programmer's limits or the availability of one.

At last, note that such changes generally need to be discussed on before doing them and you should make sure everything is done according to the matching policies.

Applying for a bot account

Even if you use a script to help with some of your edits, you do not necessarily need a bot account. Unless you are doing truly massive amounts of automated editing, and/or expect to do it repeatedly, just run the scripts from your regular user.

So, how to do it?

• Create a new account. Preferably based on your user name with "bot" in it.
• Add a brief description of the kind of things the bot will do on its user page (i.e. [[User:Mybot]]).
• Ask a bureaucrat to add it to the "bots" group.
• Done!

Spam bots

Spam bots are run by people with malicious intent to vandalize wiki pages en masse. These get listed in the list of known vandals and their changes reverted.