This content should be moved to the MediaWiki FAQ in a maintenance section.

Maintenance edit

What bots are available for large maintenance tasks? edit

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects use many bots to assist with tasks which may otherwise pose an excessive burden on wiki users or administrators. Using bots to automate tasks is especially important for implementing large multilingual wiki families.

The most helpful page describing tasks performed by particular bots on English Wikipedia is en:Wikipedia:Registered bots.

Many bot scripts use the Python Wiki Bot Framework. Pywikibot scripts lists bots based on pywikibot.

See also the Meta Wikimedia bot page.

The listing of en:Wikipedia bot users lists user accounts running bots but neither most linked bot user accounts nor the user accounts of their owners give sufficient information about the bots. Information lacking a link to the source code would be insufficient for implementors. Insufficient information is a similar problem with other Wikipedia bot pages such as en:Wikipedia:Bots.

See Category:Wiki bot topics (Q8189437) for listings of bots on each wiki. These categories should show all the automated bot accounts.

See Small wiki toolkits/Starter kit/Bots and Tools for a list of popular and useful bots on Wikimedia wikis.