User:Wiki Feed Bot

=Wiki Feed Bot=

This bot is meant to assist with the Wiki Feed project. On this page we'll explain exactly what kinds of actions this bot will undertake on Wikipedia.

Wiki Feed Project
In one sentence the Wiki Feed project creates an algorithmic (news) feed of wiki pages from recent edits or other data like page views, with an open, collaborative and forkable feed algorithm. To read a bit more on the project you can read the introduction.

So far we have made a prototype that is a proof of concept on how the algorithm that we envisioned would work in practice. You can see it in practice on our demo page. The backend that fuels this demo runs on Tools and is called algo-news.

What this bot will do
To achieve its goals the bot needs to do the following in order by priority: I'll explain these actions in a bit more detail below.
 * 1) Have bot read rights to get information in bigger batches
 * 2) Edit a page when an user transcludes User:Wiki_Feed_Bot/feed on his/her page
 * 3) Notify users on their talk pages with an automated message

Bot read rights
The Wiki Feed system preprocesses information once a day. It fetches all recent changes from yesterday, groups them in pages and then starts getting meta information about these pages. It gets this information from the API and other services like Wikidata and in the future the Pageview API.

To be able to do this as efficient as possible the Wiki Feed Bot would like bot read rights to fetch 5.000 items in one go. The bot reads information for about 40.000 pages each day.

Currently Wiki Feed does not use the RCStream. We're considering it, but we need some time to implement this as it requires a fair amount of changes to the system.

Edit of pages in users namespace
To use Wiki Feed people need to paste some wiki text onto a page in their own user's space. This wiki text has the following markup. When users add this to a page they own Wiki Feed will create a feed on that page. The feed will show pages that have been recently changed. The user can decide how these pages should get ranked by specifying which "modules" should be used for the feed. If the transclusion specifies revision_count=1 and category_count=2 as modules than recently edited pages with many categories and many revisions will come on top. Where the amount of categories is twice as important as edits.

Transcluding User:Wiki_Feed_Bot/feed with the syntax above will also add a link to the page that says: "force refresh". When clicking this link the feed gets placed immediately instead of once a day. The tool makes the user wait until it is done. Once the feed has been calculated the results are added to the page where the link originated from and the user gets redirected back to their user page.

Notify users
Instead of users having to wait for the tool to complete the feed we can add a message on the talk page as soon as the feed is ready. This allows users to continue with what they are doing and come back later. This mechanism is not yet supported, but we'd like to ask permission to do it already as this is almost certainly a feature that we need

Contact us
This project is an initiative from Edward Separia (talk) and developed by Fako Berkers (talk)