Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-1845428-20151203195944

We have a single bot, (that I know of) JefftheBot, but it was run by Mousekat, who has been inactive for over a year (and before that single edit, he was inactive for another year).

Anyway, a bot is a useful tool, and one we currently don't have access to. I would like to propose that we appoint a new bot, and I have created a new user for it: TeenBot. Obviously, I would be the one in charge of this bot.

Anyway, I know this is meant to be a public process, so that's why I'm creating this thread.

What is a bot? A bot is an automated or semi-automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain a Wiki.

Why do we need a bot? Bots can automate tasks and perform them much faster than humans. If you have a simple task that you need to perform lots of times (an example might be to add a template to all pages in a category with 1000 pages), then this is a task better suited to a bot than a human.

How would I run the bot? I'm not personally that great with any one programming language, and even in general, I only understand the basics of programming. However, there are several tools called "AutoWikiBrowser" and "Pywikipediabot" that allow a user to automatically log in with a bot account and make a large variety of changes with only simple commands. Like said previously, this would be for stuff like adding templates to a lot of pages, but also other stuff like moving all pages in a category to another category, removing links to disambiguation pages, fixing a large amount of typos, and changing links in general (if a page has had a name change, for example).

Anyway, that's about it. I already make a lot of these "bot-like" edits on my own, which, in a way, artificially inflates my edit count (though not really: I'm still doing everything manually).

Please respond with suggestions and ideas. Thank you. 