User:Rick Block/10th/3

How I got into bots

 * Two reasons:
 * List of Wikipedians by number of edits
 * List of administrators
 * List of Wikipedians by number of edits? What are you serious?
 * Yes, there's a list by number of edits.
 * This list at least used to be referenced quite often at Requests for adminship
 * My initial response was to create wp:editcountitis, initial version here
 * On reflection, if people are competing based on numbers why not something that will benefit Wikipedia a little more than sheer number of edits, like featured articles?
 * So, I created List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations
 * From the beginning I used tools, but mostly they just fetched various pages (using cURL) and I manually uploaded the resultant pages
 * What takes effort to maintain List of administrators?
 * Early versions (e.g. ) separated admins into "active" and "inactive" based on contrib history.
 * I created a script to figure out activity status, based on a script by User:Dbenbenn and updated the page manually for a few months based on the output of the script
 * After several months of doing the page changes for these activities manually, I decided to write a bot to automatically make the updates

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