Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser

The AutoWikiBrowser is a semi-automated Wikipedia editor for Microsoft Windows 2000/XP (or newer) designed to make tedious repetitive tasks quicker and easier. It is essentially a browser that automatically opens up a new page when the last is saved. When set to do so, it suggests some changes (typically formatting) that are generally meant to be incidental to the main change.

At present, AutoWikiBrowser can create a list of articles from single or multiple categories, "what links here", the wiki links on an article, a text file, a Google search, a user's watchlist, or a user's contributions.

AWB also comes with a program to scan the database, and a development version of IRCMonitor, a program that monitors the IRC recent changes channel.

The sources are available under the GPL (see Getting the sources below). It is written in C# using Microsoft Visual C# Express Edition, which is downloadable for free. There is an AWB IRC channel at irc.freenode.net — #AutoWikiBrowser.

Examples of AWB-assisted work are noted on the projects page, this page also contains projects that currently need AWB help.

Rules of use

 * Check every edit before you save it. Make sure you understand the text and have NOT changed the meaning.
 * Don't edit too fast; consider opening a bot account if you are regularly making more than a few edits a minute.
 * Don't do anything controversial with it.
 * Avoid making insignificant or inconsequential edits such as only adding or removing some white space, moving a stub tag, converting some HTML to Unicode, removing underscores from links (unless they are bad links), or something equally trivial. This is because it wastes resources and clogs up watch lists.
 * Abide by all Wikipedia guidelines, policies and common practices.


 * Repeated abuse of these rules could result, without warning, in the software being disabled.

(1) Register
Add your name to the requests for registration if you would like to use the software. For security reasons, only registered users (see the list on the check page) are able to use AutoWikiBrowser on the en.wikipedia.

Anyone can be registered, but only if an admin approves your registration by placing your name on the check page. As a general rule users with more than 500 mainspace edits will be registered. You will probably not be contacted when your registration has been approved, so check the page periodically for your name.

(2) Download
Download AutoWikiBrowser from SourceForge.

If you want to run the latest SVN version, see here.

AutoWikiBrowser requires Microsoft Windows 2000/XP or newer (Unicode doesn't work properly on Windows 98/Me). It also requires Version 2 of the .NET framework (users of Windows 2000 and Windows XP must download .NET framework, it is included in Windows Vista).

If the software doesn't work, it probably means that you're not registered or that you don't have the correct .NET framework installed.

It is recommended to unzip AWB to a new directory, rather than running, for example, straight from the desktop

(3) Get started

 * 1) Select "Make from Category" then enter a category name.
 * 2) Click "Make list", let the list load up.
 * 3) Set any options, such as find and replace, edit summary, etc.
 * 4) Click "Start!", it will load up the article, automatically make any changes and then go to the diff.
 * 5) Change anything in the article you want in the textbox on the lower right, not the normal website textbox in the browser, then click "Save" or "Ignore", the next page will load up automatically.

Having problems?

 * Occasionally it stalls when loading. This might well be because you have navigated to a different window: AWB needs to remain in the foreground while loading up a new page. Just click "start" again to give it a nudge.
 * It uses the Internet Explorer core, so if you have problems, make sure your IE is working. Make sure you have logged into Wikipedia using IE. If you have altered any settings regarding scripts, first use Tools > Internet Options > 'Advanced' tab > Click on 'Restore Defaults' and then try AWB again.
 * If you have made changes to monobook.css (or whatever your theme is) that require CSS 2 or 3, they may not appear properly in IE and thus in AWB.
 * If you are having problems creating a list from "what links here" try clearing your Internet Explorer cache.
 * A buggy monobook.js can often cause IE to display blank pages or crash AWB. This javascript problem can be avoided by disabling Active Scripting in IE INTERNET OPTIONS - SECURITY - CUSTOM LEVEL.
 * "The application failed to initialize properly..." -> get .NET 2.0 (linked above).

Refer to the FAQ for more information, including problems with other software and Wikipedia skins.

Database scanner
AWB includes a database scanner which can be used to create lists of articles to be checked, without causing extra unnecessary load on the WikiMedia Servers.

Database dumps are created from time to time (more info here) and are available for free download. As the page states, the best/most useful dump is the pages-articles.xml.bz2. Visiting the database dump progress site, allows you to view the status of the current dump, and be able to easily browse to the downloads in it.

Upon downloading, the archives need to be uncompressed, this will turn it from a ~ 2.1GB bz2 archive, into a xml database dump around 8GB.

API

 * AWB ships with WikiFunctions.dll, which can be referenced by other standalone projects. The DLL includes a wiki-ready web browser control, a simple page editor, a listmaker, and other tools and components.
 * User:Kingboyk has made available WikiFunctions2.dll which currently offers wiki-logging features for bots.

Plugins
AWB is able to load and use fully customised plugins. These plugins can process article text and extend the user interface, and are in the form of libraries (.dll files) which can be made in any .NET language such as C# or Visual Basic .NET. When AWB loads, it automatically checks to see if there are any plugins in the folder it was executed from. Any plugins found are loaded and initialised without further intervention by the user.

Tips and tricks

 * To find and replace a word of upper and lower case, do a regular expression find and replace; for example, find: "\b(T|t)hier\b" and replace with: "$1heir". The "(T|t)" matches upper or lower case "t", the "$1" references whatever "(T|t)" matches. The "\b" indicates a word boundary; this prevents words like "clothier" from matching.
 * To speed up a task, if you are correcting the above typo, set it to "Skip if doesn't contain" the typo(s) that is being corrected.
 * See this website for a breakdown of .NET regular expression syntax.
 * Turning off "Show pictures" in Internet Explorer options can speed up page loading times especially when the Wikipedia servers are responding slowly. Also, editors who do not normally use Internet Explorer yet use a custom monobook.js javascript (godmode-light, popups, etc...) for other browsers may see better page load performance by disabling "Active Scripting" in Internet Explorer security settings. NOTE:Those who manually update Windows will need to enable Active Scripting when manually checking for updates. The Windows update page will mention this if it is disabled. You can create a custom security level such that Active Scripting is disabled for Wikipedia, but not for other websites.
 * See AutoWikiBrowser/Settings for a list of useful settings you can use with AWB.
 * A newline is represented by  when doing find and replace.
 * AWB has some keywords that can be used in the textboxes/find-and-replace dialog. %%title%% represents the title of the current article (e.g. "John Smith"), and %%key%% will give you the human name category key for the current article (e.g. "Smith, John"). Other keywords can be implemented on request.