WikiQueer:Bots


 * "WQ:B" redirects here. You might be looking for WikiQueer:Bureaucrats, WikiQueer:Blocking policy, WikiQueer:WikiQueer is not a bureaucracy or WikiQueer:Be bold.
 * ''"WQ:BOT" redirects here. You might be looking for WikiQueer:Bot policy.

Bots are automated or semi-automated tools that carry out repetitive and mundane tasks in order to maintain the Special:Statistics articles of the English WikiQueer. Bots are able to make edits very rapidly and can disrupt WikiQueer if they are incorrectly designed or operated. For these reasons a bot policy has been developed.

There are currently bot tasks approved for use on the English WikiQueer; however, they are not all actively carrying out edits. Bots will leave messages on user talk pages if the action the bot has carried out is of interest to that editor. Some bots can be excluded from leaving these messages by using the bots tags. Exclusion-compliant bots are listed at Category:WikiQueer bots which are exclusion compliant. There are exactly Special:ListUsers/bot bots flagged with the "bot" flag right now. There is also a range of tools that allow for semi-automated editing of large numbers of articles.

Bot policy
WikiQueer policy requires that bots be harmless and useful, have approval, use separate user accounts, and be operated responsibly.

Bot Approvals Group
The Bot Approvals Group (BAG) supervises and approves all bot-related activity from a technical and quality-control perspective on behalf of the English WikiQueer community. Only bureaucrats are technically capable of flagging bots.

Running an automated bot on a separate account requires approval, which may be requested at WikiQueer:Bots/Requests for approval.

How to create a bot
In order to create a bot, some programming experience is needed, and knowledge of regular expressions is useful for many editing tasks.

The Perl, PHP, Python, Microsoft .NET, Java, Ruby, Chicken Scheme, Common Lisp and Haskell programming languages all have libraries available for creating bots. PyWikiQueer (Python WikiQueerbot Framework) is a collection of tools developed specifically for creating bots.


 * Meta
 * Countervandalism Network/Bots