User:Mathbot

This bot is operated by Oleg Alexandrov. Please write any comments about this bot on his talk page. See the contributions by this bot.

Mathbot stands for mathematics articles tireless helper (and bot).

List of mathematics articles


Mathbot goes every day through the list of mathematics categories looking for new mathematics and mathematician biography articles, which it appends to the list of mathematics articles and respectively the list of mathematicians. See the changes to the list of mathematics articles by day.

Mathbot is able to search for new math categories which, with some input from bot's boss, it then adds to the list of mathematics categories.

The bot also makes a list of mathematician articles that changed in the last 24 hours and downloads a copy of those to my computer. That information is used to update the dates of birth/death and country information for people in the list of mathematicians.

Recent changes to mathematics articles
Mathbot helps track the recent changes to mathematics articles (this can be useful for montioring purposes and against vandalism). This is accomplished with mathbot's recent changes script, also available from the list of mathematics articles.

Missing science topics


Mathbot maintains the mathematics lists at the missing science topics project. It uses various sources to add to the lists of mathematical topics missing from Wikipedia, and it removes the topics which got created. Mathbot is able to suggest potential redirects by comparing the names of missing topics with the names of existing topics. This is done using approximate string matching, and so far resulted in around 750 redirects being created.

Other mathematical
Mathbot suggests entries missing from lists of articles, see talk:list of numerical analysis topics for an example. It keeps the tables at the PlanetMath Exchange project up-to-date. Periodically it generates a list of all redlinks encountered in mathematics articles, see User:Mathbot/List of mathematical redlinks.

Nonmathematical
Taking a cue from his boss that nowadays one can be good at math and starve, mathbot has tried to diversify. It turns out that knowing how to count can bring one a long way, and so mathbot's skills are in demand. :) Here are the tasks mathbot is or was doing.


 * Displaying the number of open deletion debates at Articles for deletion/Old.
 * Adding a link to mathbot's tool for people wishing to be administrators listed at Requests for adminship. Mathbot's tool allows one to check his/her edit summary usage.
 * Mathbot used to update Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index, part of the Wikipedia 1.0 project. He delegated that job to a specialized bot, WP 1.0 bot.
 * During the January 2006 and December 2006 ArbCom elections, mathbot was one of the bots providing updates on how the candidates were doing, see  here and here.

In recognition for his work, mathbot got nominated for administrator on April Fools' Day 2006.

What makes mathbot tick?
Mathbot is a collection of scripts written in Perl. It uses the Perlwikipedia package to communicate with Wikipedia (older codes use WWW::Mediawiki::Client instead). The source code for the scripts updating the list of mathematics articles and list of mathematicians is available at mathbot's svn repository on Google Code (gradually, the codes for the other jobs will be added also).