Wikipedia:Bots/Dictionary

Overview Dictionary Bot policy Bot Approvals Group Guide Noticeboard Newsletter Bot Requests Requests for Approval Adminbots {{BAG Tools}} Creating a Bot List of bots Activity monitor Status report History Types

This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcut WP:BOTDICT

This is a small guide to bot-related

Each definition has an

2FA / two-factor authentication

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

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 scripts 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

WP:AWBRULES

.

bot

An

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

WP:BOTACC

.

Bot Activity Monitor / BAM

A

WP:BAM

.

Bot Approvals Group / BAG

The

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:

1. Membership in the bot group, which raises some limits in the
   WP:BOTFLAG
   .
2. 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

WP:BRFA, and WP:BAGG § Guide to BRFAs

.

bot policy

The English Wikipedia

WP:BOTPOL

.

bot trial

Bot trials are the means by which Wikipedia tests bot tasks before approving them. They occur as part of

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.

WP:BUREAUCRAT

.

Checkwiki

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

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

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

WP:CONTEXTBOT

.

cosmetic bot

A

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 edits. 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

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 prêt-à-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 scripts 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 edits from an account with a bot flag.

meatbot / meat bot

A human (made of

WP:MEATBOT

.

MediaWiki

The software that powers Wikipedia. See also

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

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

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.