Manual:Bots

Bots are automated tools that can be used to perform tedious work or certain repetitive tasks related to a wiki. An IRC RC Bot can post recent changes to your wiki on an IRC channel. WP:CREATEBOT has information on many bot frameworks, written in various programming languages, that can be used to edit wikis through the API. Because a bot can make hundreds or even thousands of edits per hour or minute, thus flooding recent changes, user rights should be configured to allow bots to be given a special user right that will prevent their edits from appearing in the default recent changes feed. As this could cause thousands of incorrect or malicious bot edits to go unnoticed for a long time, this right should only be given to bots operated by trusted users.

Bots can be used for helpful purposes, such as fixing double redirects, or for harmful purposes, such as vandalism and spamming (see also Combating spam).

The 'bot' permission can be also temporarily given to human editors who are still nevertheless flooding Recent Changes (e.g. using AutoWikiBrowser). On Wikimedia Foundation wikis, the 'flooder' or 'flood' flag gives non-bot users the 'bot' permission.

External link

 * Botwiki &mdash; A bot design and testing wiki which can be linked from WMF projects using