Wikiversity:Bots

The page documents an official English Wikiversity policy with wide acceptance by participants as a standard you should follow. Please propose and discuss changes to ensure your revisions reflect consensus.

Robots or bots are semi-automatic or automatic processes that interact with Wikiversity as though they were a human editor. They are used to manage systematic or boring tasks. Please read the guidelines below before designing and implementing any bot on Wikiversity.

Summary

Administering Wikiversity Action required The open task template Maintenance Requests for deletion Requests for speedy deletion Requests for unblock Copyright violations Proposed deletions Pending deletions Requests for custodian action Notices for custodians Templates Introduction to templates Guide to templates Welcome templates Page flag templates Navigation templates Admin templates Template task force Development Developing Wikiversity Wikiversity logos Service community Metadata MediaWiki Project MediaWiki Technical needs Reference Policies Custodians Custodianship (policy) How to be a Wikimedia sysop Mission Managing vandalism MediaWiki Handbook Parser functions Logs Bots Consensus Statistics Events and news Announcements Wikimania

A bot does repetitive tasks in a predictable fashion, and it can be done in such a way as to be healthy for the community.

Expectations

The operation of a bot requires approval. Any user can submit a request at Wikiversity:Bots/Status to obtain bot status, which prevents cluttering recent changes. Bot status is given by Bureaucrats about seven days after the request has been made, provided there has been no objection to the request by another user. The decision lies with the bureaucrats.

The bot flag may be removed after 2 or more years of bot inactivity. The bot operator will be notified on their talk page and the flag will be re-granted if the operator expresses an interest in resuming bot activity.

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

• is harmless
• is useful
• is not a server hog
• has been approved

Bot operators must:

1. create a separate account for bot operation.
2. indicate on their bot's user page:
   • which program / language is used. (Pywikipedia, Ruby, JavaScript...)
   • who the owner is.
3. discuss with other Wikiversity editors before running their bot. Any bot request has to reach consensus to be fulfilled.
4. log in with their own user account when talking to other users.

Bot operators should:

• choose a name containing the word "bot" so that editors realize they are dealing with an automaton.

Bot operators may:

• run their bot without the bot status only during its request for approval and if asked so by another editor to check how the bot works. When testing, bot operators must delay 60 seconds between edits.

Bot operators are encouraged to:

• Release their bot's source code.
• 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.
• Program their bot to stop editing if they detect that they have logged out. This can be checked by looking for bot's name in the HTML for the edit form. If the bot is not logged in, then the bot's name won't be listed in the HTML. Bots running anonymously may be blocked.

Edit rate guidelines

Bots running without a bot flag should edit at intervals of over 1 minute. Once they have been authorised and appropriately flagged, they should operate at an absolute minimum interval of 5 seconds (12 edits per minute). Bots should try to avoid running during the busiest hours, as they rapidly use server resources that should be reserved for human readers and editors. During these hours, they should operate at intervals of 20 seconds (3 edits per minute) to conserve resources.

Bots' editing speeds can be automatically adjusted based on server load (slave database server lag) by appending an extra parameter to the query string of each requested URL; see mw:Manual:Maxlag parameter.

Bot functionalities

Although a bot can be assigned a sysop flag, these requests are discouraged. The Curator flag may be assigned to a bot operated by a Custodian.

Currently flagged bots

Name of the bot	Contributions	Operator	Functions	Last activity
User:CommonsDelinker	Contribs	Siebrand	prevention of broken image links	2022-05-23
User:JackBot	Contribs	JackPotte	Special:DoubleRedirects automatically and Special:UncategorizedPages semiautomatically	2022-05-29
User:MaintenanceBot	Contribs	Dave Braunschweig	Various maintenance tasks.	2022-04-04
User:MediaWiki default	Contribs	MediaWiki default	setup edits in MediaWiki: namespace; the script is part of MediaWiki.	????-??-??
User:MediaWiki message delivery	Contribs	MediaWiki message delivery	meta:MassMessage delivery	2022-05-31
User:タチコマ robot	Contribs	White Cat	Interwiki linking, double redirect fixing, commons delinking	2017-07-04
User:MGA73bot	Contribs	MGA73	Working on files. See Wikiversity_talk:File_Review for background. Usually tasks are done with replace.py.	2023-05-04 to ????-??-??
User:Leaderbot	Contribs	Leaderboard	meta:Global reminder bot	N/A - it checks this wiki roughly every day, but only responds if needed

Notes:

The manually updated list above may not be current. Check bots group user list which is complete and see contribs for each bot.

The last update was by: --MGA73 (discuss • contribs) 08:06, 6 May 2023 (UTC)

The bot status log contains older entries of granting bot status. Newer entries will appear in the user rights log.

Request help from a bot

Do you have a task that would benefit from a bot's help? Post a request at Wikiversity:Colloquium.

Requests for bot status

Are you interested in helping Wikiversity by operating a bot? Please see Wikiversity:Bots/Status

See also

• Wikimedia Bot policy
• MediaWiki Bots