Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/DustyBot
Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic
Programming Language(s): PHP
Function Summary: Update WP:DUSTY
Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Daily
Already has a bot flag (Y/N): N
Function Details: The list of dusty pages, linked from SpecialPages, is several months out of date. The list of should be regenerated when people update the pages. Practically, this could be done once per day. DustyBot will do this in two stages. The first stage will generate a list of ~10,000 dusty pages from the most recent database dump. This requires tens of thousands of page accesses to search for and disregard disambiguation pages. Fortunately, this only needs to be done when a new database dump is available, which happens once every couple of months. The list will be built over the course of several days, keeping page accesses below 10/min. The second stage will scan this list once per day for the 100 pages that are still dusty, and post that at Wikipedia:Dusty articles. Because this bot will only edit Wikipedia once per day, and will only change one hard coded page, the risk of interfering with other editors is low. I am interested in hearing ideas about how to reduce the number of page accesses.