User:Jpr@uab.edu/DocsBotCookbook

Writing bots for docs is for finding and writing information.

Some things to get started.

Anatomy of a Bot

Everything has an anatomy and bots are no different. If you want them to help you, you need to understand what makes them tick. The Creating a bot page give a good overview. To get a starting context, make sure you read:

• Reasons for Bots
• Considerations before getting started
• Operation overview
• Overview of Developing a Bot

The enter Bot page can useful info to any project from the perspective of general project rules. Make sure to also read the last section on programming languages just to make sure to have a good context for future background thought. There are libraries for a number of popular development languages and platforms.

Useful Existing Bots

There's already a lot of work in this space and some tools are designed to be generally helpful, like edit assitors.

AutoWikiBot

The AutoWikiBrowser bot is a mediawiki editor for windows that is designed to ease editing tasks. It looks interesting but it's possible our default config for authn on docs will make tools like this harder to use since our log in is not by user/pass. If it supports ssl auth then it's awesome. Otherwise something else woudl need to be done to support tools like this.