User:Tester Bot 1
 | This user account is a bot operated by Blåmerke (talk). It is used to make repetitive automated or semi-automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually, in accordance with the bot policy. It is currently blocked, either due to a bot malfunction, or a violation of either its terms of approval or the bot policy. Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it. |
Emergency bot shutoff button
Administrators: Use this button if the bot is malfunctioning. (direct link)
Non-administrators can a malfunctioning bot to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.
The intention of this bot is to revert any vandalism that may be conducted by anyone.
Just like a human editor, a Wikipedia bot reads Wikipedia pages, and makes changes where it thinks changes need to be made. The difference is that, although bots are faster and less prone to fatigue than humans, they are nowhere near as bright as we are. Bots are good at repetitive tasks that have easily defined patterns, where few decisions have to be made.
In the most typical case, a bot logs in to its own account and requests pages from Wikipedia in much the same way as a browser does – although it does not display the page on screen, but works on it in memory – and then programmatically examines the page code to see if any changes need to be made. It then makes and submits whatever edits it was designed to do, again in much the same way a browser would.
Because bots access pages the same way people do, bots can experience the same kind of difficulties that human users do. They can get caught in edit conflicts, have page timeouts, or run across other unexpected complications while requesting pages or making edits. Because the volume of work done by a bot is larger than that done by a live person, the bot is more likely to encounter these issues. Thus, it is important to consider these situations when writing a bot.