Help:Bots

This page is for the discussion of automated scripts aka bots.

See Howto count and list all howto, guide, and object pages in Wikihowto, for the desciption and methodology of the page parsing script.

Old Bots

 * Help:Bots/Page Extraction Script
 * Help:Bots/Page Extraction Script(old)

Howto Page Name Correction

 * A bot that renames "how to" page names to "howto" (because I imagine people will continue to make this mistake even after we fix up the current list of pages)
 * This is a good idea and when i have time i will make it. ZyMOS 22:28, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Wanted object page create

 * A bot that searches for empty links to objects and generates object pages for them with a link to the appropriate wikipedia article (if there is no wikipedia article for that exact word, then these object pages could be listed on a page so humans know they need to put the appropriate links in place). The bot would create the object pages with the standard object page layout.
 * Ive thought about this. There are 2 concerns i have.  We don't want to be a website with 100's of pages that have essentially no content(they would have a link to wikipedia.  Also there is a challenge in making sure there are not lots of duplicate pages with very similar names(this would be difficult for a script to detect, but very easy for humans to see. ZyMOS 22:28, 15 July 2006 (UTC) What are your thoughts. ZyMOS 22:28, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
 * This is a good point, i agree, it would be strange to have the majority of pages (at this stage at least) on wikihowto being just link pages to wikipedia. So far when I've been writing howtos and guides i've been making object pages for every object mentioned in the howto... should we perhaps only make object pages that we would actually list the howto/guide on?  For example, on the page Howto promptly inform people of your change of address, i made object pages for about 20 objects, but I only felt it was appropriate to list the actual howto on about 3 of those object pages, so the other 17 or so object pages are, just as you say, links to wikipedia (at this stage) and don't have any howtos or guides listed on them.  Would it be better to have just made three object pages and left the other pages inactive until a related howto/guide was written?  (sorry this is getting a bit off the topic of bots).  --A vivid dreamer 06:41, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Another thought... if we made a policy that we only make links for object pages that are directly related to the howto/guide, then the bot could create the object pages for those links and also add the name of the howto/guide that linked to the new object page. If the object page already exists, the bot could add the new howto/guide to the existing object page.  I can think of two immediate concerns with this idea, but they may be able to be over come:  Concern 1 - We already have many links to object pages with no howtos/guides directly related to them, so we'd have to manually remove all those links from existing howtos/guides, and, Concern 2 - It may possibly be hard to communicate to new users that they are only meant to make links to objects directly related to the howto/guide they are writing, so if anyone mistakenly made links to objects that aren't directly related, the bot wouldn't be able to detect what was relevant and what was not.  Anyway, just thought I'd mention it.  --A vivid dreamer 07:01, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Object Wikipedia link checker

 * not sure the best way to do it yet....
 * ZyMOS 05:40, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Script to unifomilize objects pages

 * this wouldn't be too hard to do but is it what we really want?
 * ZyMOS 05:40, 29 July 2006 (UTC)