Wikipedia:Tip of the day/December 16, 2008

Automating tasks on Wikipedia

Uploading hundreds of files or changing thousands of pages can be tedious. We allow limited automation unless it interferes with normal systems operations. You always can grab your favorite scripting language and write a bot, but there's no need to reinvent the wheel: take a look at PyWikipediaBot, a quite complex automation framework for Wikipedia. If you are more into Perl, libwww-perl is a very useful library for automating web tasks. If you have tested your bot and intend to run it over a longer period of time, please get in touch with the developers first (preferably using the wikitech-l mailing list) or by requesting a flag here. We then can register your bot, so it can be hidden from the list of recent changes.

Read more: Bots

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