User:Mathbot

This bot is operated by Oleg Alexandrov. Please write any comments about this bot on his talk page. See the contributions by this bot.

Mathbot stands for mathematics articles tireless helper (and bot).

List of mathematics articles


Mathbot goes every day through the list of mathematics categories looking for new mathematics and mathematician biography articles, which it appends to the list of mathematics articles and respectively the list of mathematicians. See the changes to the list of mathematics articles by day. See more detailed documentation.

Mathbot is able to search for new math categories which, with some input from bot's boss, it then adds to the list of mathematics categories.

The bot also makes a list of mathematician articles that changed in the last 24 hours and downloads a copy of those to my computer. That information is used to update the dates of birth/death and country information for people in the list of mathematicians.

Missing science topics


Mathbot maintains the mathematics lists at the missing science topics project. It uses various sources to add to the lists of mathematical topics missing from Wikipedia, and it removes the topics which got created. Mathbot is able to suggest potential redirects by comparing the names of missing topics with the names of existing topics. This is done using approximate string matching, and so far resulted in around 750 redirects being created.

Other mathematical
Mathbot suggests entries missing from lists of articles, see Talk:list of numerical analysis topics for an example. It keeps the tables at the PlanetMath Exchange project up-to-date. Periodically it generates a list of mathematical redlinks. It also maintains a list of most linked math articles.

Nonmathematical work
Mathbot displays the number of open deletion discussions for the pages listed at Articles for deletion/Old, it initiates the pages that will contain upcoming deletion discussions, and archives the pages on which all discussions have been closed.

Here are some tasks mathbot was doing in the past:


 * Adding a link to mathbot's tool for people wishing to be administrators listed at Requests for adminship. Mathbot's tool allows one to check his/her edit summary usage.
 * Updating Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index, part of the Wikipedia 1.0 project. He delegated that job to a specialized bot, WP 1.0 bot.
 * Providing updates during the Arbitration Committee elections for 2005, 2006, and 2007.

In recognition for his work, mathbot got nominated for administrator on April Fools' Day 2006.

What makes mathbot tick?
Mathbot is a collection of scripts written in Perl. It uses the Perlwikipedia package to communicate with Wikipedia (older codes use WWW::Mediawiki::Client instead). The source code for the scripts is available at mathbot's svn repository on Google Code.