Bots Arrive

Editors who happen to be programmers can write software for making certain types of procedural edits automatically. These programs are nicknamed bots, and Artie may be visited by a slew of them over his life. Some will make spelling corrections or small formatting changes in compliance with Manual of Style guidelines, while others analyze the content of a new page—by keywords, for example—and log it to various lists kept as project pages. (The logs can be detected in the backlinks.) Any edits made by bots will be clearly visible in the article's history, just like edits made by human editors; a bot is just another type of account. (A bot's username almost always indicates that it's a bot, not a human, for example, Sinebot, the bot that goes around signing comments on talk pages when editors fail to do so.)

If Artie hasn't been categorized, Artie's first bot edit might be the addition of an {{uncategorized}} tag.

Note

See a bot misbehaving? You can normally contact the bot's programmer via the bot's user talk page. So Eddie has some recourse if a bot messes up his article with some automated edit; Eddie should revert the edit but also notify the bot's owner.