Wikipedia:Types of bots

Below is a categorization of possible useful Wikipedia bots. None of these possibilities are necessarily recommended or implemented.

Examples of actual bots used on Wikipedia can be found at history of Wikipedia bots.

1. Automatic importer-by-request

This bot imports entries from a public/GFDL database one manual request at a time. There is not an implementation of a user interface for seeing possible entries, etc. This kind of bot avoids most of the problems of

2. Automatic importer

This bot imports batches of entries from a public/GFDL database. If used, it is expected that it imports entries that are as well-formed Wikipedia entries as possible. See Bot History for examples.

3. Other automatic tools and scripts.

This includes spellcheckers, Wikifyers, etc. The possibilities are endless.

4. Data Miner

A tool which attempts to use information extraction techniques to extract structured information from Wikipedia.

If you want to do this, it is preferable to download a database dump and run the bot on your own server. You will get much better performance, and will not interfere with other Wikipedia users, or cause unneeded network traffic. The only disadvantage of this is that your copy of Wikipedia will not incorporate the most recent changes; but this should not be too big an issue for most information extraction applications. (You can always redownload and rerun the application again at a later date.)