Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/User manual

This is the user manual for AutoWikiBrowser. It is community-maintained outside of the development team It may contain information that is out of date with the latest AutoWikiBrowser releases. Feel free to edit, add, or remove to improve the comprehension and quality.

Warning: You take full responsibility for any action you perform using AutoWikiBrowser. You must understand Wikipedia policies and use this tool within these policies, or risk losing access to the tool or even being blocked from editing.

Welcome to the User manual for AutoWikiBrowser, also known as AWB. AWB is a semi-automatic wiki-editor created to edit Wikipedia and other wikis hosted with the MediaWiki software. Among other things, AWB is designed to perform search & replace instructions provided by the user, upon a list of pages it assists the user in making. It also has numerous settings for specifying related actions, such as skipping pages, adding material to the beginning or end of each page, etc.

Once started, AWB loads the first page on the list and executes the changes that were provided by the user. When it is done editing a page, it displays the differences between the original and modified versions of the page, and waits for the user to accept the changes or decide to skip the page. Before making such a decision, the user may manually edit the page in AWB's editing window. Once the user accepts or skips the changes, AWB saves the page to the wiki and automatically loads and processes the next page on the list.

In addition to assisting page selection, AWB's list-making feature is very useful for making list articles.

AWB has grown more useful over the years and includes some very powerful subsystems and advanced features. These include a database scanner for searching the Wikipedia database (which you must download first), and an external processing tool that executes a program written by the user on each page on AWB's list.

With great power comes great responsibility. AWB is so powerful that there are special security precautions in place to protect Wikipedia from its misuse. To be able to use AWB on Wikipedia, editors must be eligible and must also acquire AWB registration. To be eligible for AWB registration, an editor must have a user account, and must have made at least 500 edits in the article namespace. Users must also follow the strict AWB rules of use. Failure to do so may result in the loss of AWB registration, and may also get you blocked from editing Wikipedia, so please be careful. Once you have read the rules, see Using this software on how to get registered, load the program, and get started.