Interwiki bot

This is a place to discuss updating interwiki links with a bot.

Interwiki bot at work

Wikidata (In Progress)

Due to the introduction of wikidata, interwiki bot will need serious modifications. Please refrain from running it on Wikipedia articles until it plays nicely with Wikidata. Please see Requests for comment/Wikidata rollout and interwiki bots for more information.

This section needs more information on how the new bot will operate

Introduction

It is a challenge to maintain the links from an article in one language to all of the versions of that article in other languages. Each time a new version is introduced, changes name, or is deleted, all of the other versions should be updated.

We now have a mailing list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibots-l It is recommended that all operators subscribe to this list.

There is an interwiki bot coded in Python by Rob W.W. Hooft (c) 2003. It requests an article, parses interwikis and checks if the other wikis are up to date.

From the .py file:

Script to check language links for general pages. This works by downloading the page, and using existing translations plus hints from the command line to download the equivalent pages from other languages. All of such pages are downloaded as well and checked for interwiki links recursively until there are no more links that are encountered. A rationalization process then selects the right interwiki links, and if this is unambiguous, the interwiki links in the original page will be automatically updated and the modified page uploaded.

The robot tries to be soft on the wikipedia server: it uses the new Special:Export feature to get more than one page in one request, and it waits between requests. The robot will (unless changed) not modify more than one page per minute.

This robot has a growing operator community.

Before being used on a wiki, its community should authorise such a bot to update the wiki. it can be tested on a small number of pages to demonstrate its purpose.

The best thing is to have an operator for each language that wants to run the robot.

Interwiki Bot FAQ

Please see the up-to-date version at Yuri's talk page.

Stats

Some statistics: up-to-date reference

        articles     interwiki links   average number
 en:     973k           1100k             1.1
 de:     357k            856k             2.4
 fr:     237k            720k             3.0
 pl:     212k            637k             3.0
 ja:     181k            476k             2.6
 it:     140k            529k             3.8
 sv:     134k            565k             4.2
 nl:     127k            632k             4.6
 pt:     112k            536k             4.8
 es:      94k            556k             5.9
 zh:      56k            407k             7.3
 ru:      56k            357k             6.4
 no:      49k            371k             7.6
 fi:      47k            417k             8.9
 da:      37k            359k             9.7
 eo:      33k            327k             9.9
 he:      32k            286k             8.9
 hu:      25k            212k             8.5
 ca:      25k            284k            11.4
 uk:      23k            192k             8.3
 id:      13k            170k            13.1
 af:       4k            144k            31.3
 la:       4k             86k            20.0

Operators

See Interwiki bot/Operators for a list of bot operators.

See Using the python wikipediabot for an attempt to get new operators started.

Operators of the bot, and in fact all people that want to discuss the implementation or the usage of this code, are welcome to join the mailing list pywikipediabot-users@lists.sourceforge.net by subscribing at the mailinglist information page

Interwiki warnfiles

• Interwiki bot/Warnfiles: recent warnfiles for bot operators can be found here.

See also

• Interwiki sorting order
• Disambiguation
• Interwiki links to the same page are different from the Esperanto Wikipedia