Wikipedia:Bots

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This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

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This page in a nutshell: On Wikipedia, bots are computer-controlled user accounts performing various tasks in order to maintain the encyclopedia. Bots are used for many purposes, for instance removing obvious vandalism and archiving talk pages. All bots must be approved by a special group before they are put into use.

A bot (a common nickname for software robot) is an automated tool that carries out repetitive and mundane tasks to maintain the 60,557,549 pages of the English Wikipedia. Bots are able to make edits very rapidly, but can disrupt Wikipedia if they are incorrectly designed or operated. For these reasons, a bot policy has been developed.

There are currently 2,687 bot tasks approved for use on the English Wikipedia; however, not all approved tasks involve actively carrying out edits. Bots will leave messages on user talk pages if the action that the bot has carried out is of interest to that editor. Some bots can be excluded from leaving these messages by using the {{bots}} tags. There are 211 exclusion-compliant bots, which are listed in this category. There are 297 bots flagged with the "bot" flag right now (and over 400 former bots). There is also a range of tools that allow semi-automated editing of large numbers of articles.