RationalWiki:Bots

Bots (short for "robots") are (usually small) computer programs/scripts created to perform repetitive tasks or to ease routine maintenance of a website.

On wikis Bot is a class of user which is usually such a program, although some users have Bot alteregos or make themselves technically bots so that repetitive tasks won't clog up Special:RecentChanges.

A current list of RW's bots can be found here (there are 54). Any of these which are generally applicable should have usage instructions on their user page.

Active bots

Edit filter

Blocks people who trigger certain edit filters.

Inferno Bot

The fifth incarnation of a talkpage archival bot. Configurable with a template. See userpage for instructions.

How to make your own

You can talk to the API at http://rationalwiki.org/w/api.php. See the MediaWiki help pages.

Pywikibot

It's probably easiest to use a framework like Pywikibot. You want to use the new "core" version, not the old "compat".

Getting started

Follow the installation instructions to install Pywikibot & dependencies (note: some systems also have packages for Pywikibot: [1] [2]).

Now create the rationalwiki family; this will tell Pywikibot how to interact with the RationalWiki API:

python3.4 generate_family_file.py http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page rationalwiki

will give you a family file in pywikibot/families/rationalwiki_family.py. The default will do fine for most cases.

You'll need to edit the user-config.py:

mylang = 'en'
family = 'rationalwiki'
usernames['rationalwiki']['en'] = 'MummificationBot'

Finally, test your setup with python pwb.py login, which should prompt for the login password for your bot, and then output Logged in on somewiki:lang as bot username. The password should be remembered.

Multiple accounts

Pywikibot only supports a single account name; for separate accounts you could use something along the lines of this in your user-config.py:

import os, sys

mylang = 'en'
family = 'rationalwiki'
user = os.getenv('RW_USER')

valid = {
    'MummificationBot': 'store password here if you want',
    'RedirectBot': 'store password here if you want',
}

if user not in valid.keys():
    print('No such user; valid users: {}'.format(valid.keys()))
    sys.exit(1)

print(user)
usernames['rationalwiki']['en'] = user

del user
del valid

Now just set the RW_USER environment variable before running the script:

RW_USER=MummificationBot python pwb.py login

An alternative is using separate Pywikibot directories (this is the documented way, but a bit silly).