Board Thread:DC Wiki Discussion/@comment-1738746-20151202010633

(For users who are casual editors and don't know what a bot is/what I'm talking about, don't worry about it and keep editing :) For those who do know what a bot is/have a general idea or experience, please read on as your feedback is highly regarded!)

So I've had this idea for a while but never got round to posting about it for others to comment on. I would like to implement a bot on this wiki in order to help with smaller tasks, so that we can focus our attention on bigger things like bringing articles up to standard or adding images to articles. The bot would be operated by me, using AWB software (so it will be mostly, if not 100%, semi-automated rather than automated).

For those unsure as to what a bot is:

"A bot is a piece of software that makes automated edits on a wikia and also helps human users to make semi-automated edits. Bots are most often used in short runs to make repetitive edits to many pages, such as moving a group of pages to a new category, fixing links to disambiguation pages, or to search for misspelled words and replace them with correct ones." (More info here)

There are already a few small projects that we could utilise a bot for, such as the batch deletion of unused redirects we have (it's looking close to 2000 at this stage), as well as to fix spelling & consistency errors with categories (e.g. Western Dragons vs Pygmy, and Egg sprite vs Adult Sprite). Another big issue I found this afternoon is that we have around 90 "Wanted" pages, with most just being mis-linked pages on people's talk pages or article talk pages. A bot can be used to fix these so that we can see if there are genuinely any wanted pages on the wiki and start to work on them.

The point of this thread is to discuss community approval of a bot being used on this wiki.

Please use the comments below to state whether you approve or disapprove of the use of a bot, as well as to include any comments and queries on the subject.

That aside, the other thing to discuss is what you would like to name the bot :) I want to go with a DC-themed name (for obvious reasons :P), and the best I thought of was "LagmonsterBot". Other alternatives could be "DatamonsterBot" (less known than The Lagmonster, but still had an event) or "LeetleBot" (after the Leetle Tree- not keen to use this name as it's too similar to TJ's Leetle Adoptables site). Any other name suggestions? Comment below!  