From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia information page
This is a small guide to
bot
-related
terms of art
on Wikipedia. For convenience, links to other definitions on this page are
italicized
.
Each definition has an
anchor
, which can then be used to create links to that definition. For example, to link to the definition of a
bot op
, you can use
[[WP:BOTDICT#bot op]]
to create
WP:BOTDICT#bot op
, which will take you directly to the definition. Each listed variant (e.g.
bot operator
) has a corresponding anchor (e.g.
#bot operator
).
- 2FA / two-factor authentication
- Two-factor authentication
(2FA), here using a
TOTP
token supplied by an app on a phone or other personal device. This increases account security, but interferes with automated login by a bot, so a
bot passwords
or
OAuth
is normally used to allow the bot to authenticate.
- adminbot / admin bot
- A
bot
that has access to
administrator tools
, i.e. is in the
sysop
group.
See also
WP:ADMINBOT
.
- API / application programming interface
- An API can refer to any
application programming interfaces
, but usually refers to MediaWiki's
action API
, which is a way for bots to communicate with websites (such as Wikipedia) and perform operations on them.
See also
mw:API
.
- assert / assertion
- Usually refers to
mw:API:Assert
, used to ensure a bot only edits while logged in.
- assisted editing / semi-automated editing
- Refers to editing that is assisted by various
script
s
and tools (such as
AutoWikiBrowser
). Typically, a human editor is presented with each edit and must individually approve it before it is submitted. It can also refer to edits made via scripts such as
Twinkle
, which uses pre-filled boilerplate forms for 'standard' nominations and notices.
See also
automated editing
.
- automated editing
- Refers to editing that is done automatically, without human review, i.e. editing done by bots.
See also
assisted editing
.
- AutoWikiBrowser / AWB
- AutoWikiBrowser
is one of the most popular
assisted-editing
tools out there, and can also form the basis of many fully-automated bots.
See also
WP:AWB
and
WP:AWBRULES
.
- bot
- An
automated
tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain Wikipedia's articles and other pages. Short for
robot
. Many
types of bots exist
. Also commonly used to refer to a
bot account
.
See also
WP:BOTS
.
- bot account
- A bot's user account. It should typically have the word BOT in its account name, or otherwise be descriptive of the task, and clearly indicate who the
bot operator
running the account is.
See also
WP:BOTACC
.
- Bot Activity Monitor / BAM
- A
bot-monitoring system
that checks if bots have edited recently, currently maintained by
SDZeroBot
. This is mostly useful for
bot operator
s
to be notified of bot crashes.
See also
WP:BAM
.
- Bot Approvals Group / BAG
- The
Bot Approvals Group
(BAG) oversees most areas and processes dealing with bots on Wikipedia and is responsible for overseeing
bot requests for approval
(BRFAs).
See also
WP:BAG
and
WP:BAGG
.
- BAG member / BAGger
- Members of the
BAG
. BAG members are trusted to understand Wikipedia's
bot policy
and to offer sound bot-related advice to bot operators, admins, bureaucrats, and editors alike. While some BAG members are also
admins
or
bureaucrats
, the role of BAG members should not be confused with that of bureaucrats or admins.
See also the
BAG member list
.
- bot flag
- The term has two distinct but related meanings:
- Membership in the
bot
group, which raises some limits in the
API
and grants some additional rights, including the right to use the bot flag as in sense 2.
See also
WP:BOTFLAG
.
- Used to flag individual edits as "bot" edits, which causes them to be hidden by default on
RecentChanges
and allows them to be hidden on
watchlists
. Some bot edits are not marked with the bot flag, such as bots designed to notify users of ongoing discussions.
- bot coder / bot maintainer
- A user who writes and maintains the code of the bot. Bot coders will often, but not always, be the
bot op
for the bot they code.
- bot op / bot operator / bot owner
- A user who operates and is responsible for the bot's edits. Will often, but not always, be the same person as the
bot coder
.
- BotPasswords / bot password
- An alternative username and password that can be used to log into an account via the API
action=login
with restricted user rights available. See
mw:Manual:Bot passwords
for details. If possible,
OAuth
should be used instead.
- BRFA / (Bot) Requests for Approval
- Refers to the
process by which bots are approved
.
Bot operator
s
will detail the task for which they request approval, along with technical information about the bot. The process is open and all editors (including unregistered users) are welcomed to comment. BRFAs evaluate both whether consensus exists for the task, and if the bot's technical implementation is sound.
See also
WP:BOTAPPROVAL
,
WP:BRFA
, and
WP:BAGG § Guide to BRFAs
.
- bot policy
- The English Wikipedia
bot policy
. Other
editions of Wikipedia
and other
Wikimedia
projects have their own bot policies, which may significantly differ from the English Wikipedia's policy. See also
WP:BOTPOL
.
- bot trial
- Bot trials are the means by which Wikipedia tests bot tasks before approving them. They occur as part of
BRFAs
.
See also
WP:BOTAPPROVAL
,
WP:BRFA
, and
WP:BAGG § Guide to BRFAs
.
- bureaucrat / 'crat
- A user with the ability to flag accounts as belonging to admins or bots, among other things.
BAG members
will advise bureaucrats on whether proposed
bot
s
and
adminbot
s
should be flagged as such. Bureaucrats technically make the final determination of whether the proper process was followed, or if consensus supports such a task, but will usually defer to BAG's judgement.
See also
WP:BUREAUCRAT
.
- Checkwiki
- Checkwiki
is a project that helps clean up
wikicode
and other errors in the source code of Wikipedia.
See also
WP:CHECKWIKI
.
- cluttering / flooding
- Edits made on Wikipedia appear on several special pages so they can be monitored and reviewed. Editing on a large scale will cause multiple pages to appear in
Special:RecentChanges
and
Special:Watchlist
in a short amount of time, and the changes will also be present in
page histories
. This is known as
flooding
or
cluttering
, and is one of the main reasons for the existence of
WP:COSMETICBOT
. The
bot flag
is designed to reduce the impact of flooding on
Special:RecentChanges
and
Special:Watchlist
, but will never completely eliminate it.
Meat bot
s
do not have access to such a flag.
- context bot
- A
bot
which makes
context-sensitive edit
s
. Most context bots are denied, unless it can be demonstrated that no false positives will arise, or are run as
manual bot
s
.
See also
WP:CONTEXTBOT
.
- context-sensitive edit
- A context-sensitive edit is one that could be either valid or invalid, depending on the situation. For instance, changing "Dr. Suess" to "Dr. Seuss" by bot would be a bad idea?? while "Dr. Suess" is a likely typo for
Dr. Seuss
, it could also be a correct reference to
Dr. Hans Eduard Suess
.
See also
WP:CONTEXTBOT
.
- cosmetic bot
- A
bot
which makes
cosmetic edit
s
. Purely cosmetic bots are typically forbidden per
WP:COSMETICBOT
, but bots can be allowed to make certain cosmetic changes by consensus or in addition to their primary task.
- cosmetic edit / substantive edit
- A
cosmetic
edit is one that doesn't change the output HTML or readable text of a page. By contrast, a
substantive edit
is one that does change the output HTML or readable text of a page. Cosmetic edits will almost always be
minor edit
s
. They may improve the
friendliness and consistency of the wikitext
, although
edit warring
on presentation (e.g. changing
|parameter=value
to
|?parameter?=?value
, or changing templates from
single line
to
multiline
, and vice versa) is generally not acceptable in a bot edit.
- The term
cosmetic
refers to changing the appearance of the
wikitext
without changing the appearance of the output page.
See also
WP:COSMETICBOT
.
- cron
- A
cron
is a Unix program used for scheduling a bot task to be automatically run in periodic intervals, even if the bot operator is asleep.
- editor-hostile wikitext / editor-friendly wikitext
- Editor-hostile
wikitext
refers to wikitext that is technically correct, and does not on its own cause errors, but which causes either
a)
code readability issues,
b)
poor interactions with common tools, or
c)
unpleasant surprises
when edited. For example
- a)
prêt-à-porter
renders as
pret-a-porter
, but is very hard to quickly understand while reading the edit window.
- b)
A citation template formatted like
{{citejournal|issue=21|last=Smith|year=2008|title=Article of Things|journal=Journal of Things|volume=20|first=John|pages=156|doi=10.12345/654456}}
- is harder to understand than one formatted like
{{cite journal |last=Smith |first=John |year=2008 |title=Article of Things |journal=Journal of Things |volume=20 |issue=21 |pages=156 |doi=10.12345/654456}}
- due to the poor parameter order and lack of whitespace structure, even if they render the same. The improved parameter order makes it easier to see what information is present (or missing), and the improved
?|parameter=value
whitespace structure creates an easily recognizable visual pattern while also improving
line wrapping
in the edit window.
- c)
<br>
and
<br />
render the same. However, while
wikicode
-highlighting
script
s
will correctly recognize
"well-formed" elements
like
<br />
, they will often not understand that
<br>
means the same thing.
- d)
If
[[Category:Physicists|Sir Isaac Newton]]
is present twice on the same page, this is treated exactly as if it was present only once. However someone may decide to change the
sortkey
for the article to something like
[[Category:Physicists|Newton, Isaac]]
and forget about the
other
sortkey present on the page, and cause a sortkey
collision
.
- Fixing editor-hostile wikitext constitutes a
cosmetic edit
and is typically not allowed by bots, although some cases (such as collisions) may be deemed editor-hostile enough to be treated by bot if they cross the
threshold of usefulness
.
- exclusion-compliant bot
- A bot that will respect
{{
nobots
}}
or other methods of preventing a bot from editing a page.
AWB
and
Pywikibot
-based bots are automatically exclusion-compliant.
See also
Category:Wikipedia bots which are exclusion compliant
.
- gadget
- A
user script
managed using
Extension:Gadgets
so that it shows up in
Special:Preferences
. Gadgets are much easier for inexperienced users to enable than other user scripts. Some can be used to perform
assisted editing
.
- manual bot / semi-automated bot
- A
meat bot
with a dedicated
bot account
. Like
regular bots
, manual bots are subject to
BRFAs
, and can only operate within the terms of their approval. This is typical done to perform
context-sensitive edit
s
from an account with a
bot flag
.
- meatbot / meat bot
- A human (made of
meat
, unlike a robot) editor that makes a large amount of repetitive edits from their own account, often with
semi-automated
tools, much like a bot would. For the purpose of dispute resolution, it is irrelevant if edits are made by actual bots or by meatbots.
See also
WP:MEATBOT
.
- MediaWiki
- The software that powers Wikipedia.
See also
MediaWiki
and
WP:MEDIAWIKI
.
Not to be confused with
Wikimedia
or the
Wikimedia Foundation
.
- minor edit
- A minor edit is one where only small and superficial differences are made. Examples include typographical corrections, fixes to formatting, and adding dates to maintenance categories. Minor edits should require no review and be uncontroversial.
See also
WP:MINOR
.
Cosmetic edit
s
will almost always be minor edits.
- null bot
- A bot that makes
null edits
. Bots typically don't need approval for this, unless making null edits in large numbers that would affect server performance, or requiring access to special
bot-only
API
features.
- null edit
- A
null edit
is an edit where the page is saved without changes. This is sometimes done to force a server-side cache purge and force the page to be re-rendered from scratch. This causes category sorting, "what links here" results, how templates are rendered, and so on to be updated.
See also
WP:NULL
.
- OAuth
- OAuth
is a mechanism for a bot to take action as if it were a different user (or on behalf of different user) without having to know the user's password. For example,
OAbot
will
ask users to allow OAuth access
, so it can make edits
as the user
. It also provides the ability to restrict the user rights available to the bot when logged in in this manner.
See
mw:Help:OAuth
and
mw:OAuth/For Developers
for details specific to OAuth on Wikipedia.
A bot will typically use an
owner-only consumer
to simplify the process.
- PAWS
- PAWS
is a WMF service that allows bot operators to execute Python code in a
Jupyter Notebook
setup.
- Pywikibot
- Pywikibot
is a
Python
library for developing bot applications. It also contains a number of standard
built-in scripts
. It is arguably the most used bot framework.
- spectrum / threshold of usefulness
- The "spectrum of usefulness" is a general concept useful in evaluating bot tasks. A proposed bot task will typically involve improvements to articles (even if only from a technical perspective), such as improving
HTML5
compliance, making
cosmetic
improvements, fixing obvious mistakes, fixing
editor-hostile wikitext
, adding missing information, or improving the
machine-readability
of an article. However, the
bot policy requires
that bots are considered useful while not consuming resources unnecessarily. Each proposed task falls somewhere on the spectrum, and must cross a certain "threshold" to be deemed useful enough to the community. While cosmetic edits are typically on the lower end of usefulness, they will sometimes be useful enough to have community consensus to be done on their own. Likewise, while substantive edits are typically on the higher end of usefulness, doing them with a bot will sometimes create
more problems than it solves
.
N
|
|
Y
|
- Toolforge
- Toolforge
is WMF-hosted server environment commonly used for hosting automatic bots.
- Twinkle
- Twinkle
is one of the most popular JavaScript
gadgets
that helps
autoconfirmed users
and
admins
with common maintenance tasks and in dealing with vandalism and other problematic behaviour.
See also
WP:TWINKLE
.
- user script / script
- JavaScript
and/or
CSS
that alters the
MediaWiki
user interface. They might be as simple as changing colors or something very complex such as
Twinkle
. Most user scripts are enabled by adding loading code to
your common.js
, while
gadget
s
are user scripts that may be enabled in
Special:Preferences
. Some can be used to perform
assisted editing
.
- wikitext / wikicode / wiki markup / wiki syntax
- The "raw text" used to create Wikipedia pages. Formally refers to the
MediaWiki
syntax.
See also
Wiki §?Editing
, and
WP:WIKICODE
.
- WPCleaner
- WPCleaner
is a tool designed to help with various maintenance tasks, especially repairing links to disambiguation pages, checking Wikipedia, fixing spelling and typography, and helping with translation of articles coming from other wikis.
See also
WP:WPCLEANER
.