Help:Creating a bot

Robots or bots are automatic processes that interact with Wikipedia as though they were a human editor. This article attempts to explain how to carry out the development of a bot for use on wikipedia.

Overview of the process of developing a bot

Actually coding or writing a bot is only one part of developing a bot. You should generally follow the development cycle below:

• Come up with an idea. If you don't have an idea of what to write a bot for, you could pick up ideas at requests for work to be done by a bot.
• Make sure it isn't being used already. You can see a list of what tasks are already performed by a bot, see Wikipedia:Registered bots.
• Come up with a detailed proposal of what you want it to do
• Make sure your proposal meets the criteria of wikipedia bot policy
• Think about how you might create it. There are different types of bot and the main body of the article below will cover this technical side.
• Post your proposal and post it to Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval
• People will comment on your proposal and it will be either accepted or rejected.
• If accepted, it would probably be put on a trial period during which it may be run to fine-tune it and iron out any bugs.
• At the end of the trial period it would hopefully be accepted.
• If you want to make a change of major functionality to your bot in the future, you should request this as above using the request process.

How do I make a new bot?

Bot clones

There are already a number of bots that require manual assistance which you can subscribe to, download and run a clone of in order to perform useful tasks whilst browsing wikipedia. List examples.

Developing a truly new bot

There are client-side and server-side bots. The differences are outlined below.

Developing a client-side bots

Using Javascript, for example. These run on your machine.

Developing a erver-side bot

Can be written in Perl or Python and then hosted either on your own machine (with an appropriate compiler) or on a remote webserver.

Using existing code chunks and wikipedia modules.