Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser

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AutoWikiBrowser - v3.3.1.0
Home General information about AutoWikiBrowser and directions for installation.	Request approval Request approval to be added to the CheckPage to use AutoWikiBrowser.	Discussion Discuss the application and ask questions.	Bugs Report bugs in the application.	Feature Requests Request new features to be implemented into AWB	User manual The full user manual.
Developer Talk Page · Typos · User talk templates · Plugins · IRCMonitor · AWB Projects · Changelog · AWB Sandbox
AutoWikiBrowser is not an automatic bot — edits made using this software are the responsibility of the editor using it. Although AWB does have an automatic mode enabled for some bot accounts, it normally just assists a human.

AutoWikiBrowser
Developer:	AutoWikiBrowser project (see below for list)
Latest release:	3.3.1.0 / 2007-03-31
OS:	Windows
Use:	Wikipedia editor
License:	GPL
Website:	sourceforge.net/.../autowikibrowser

Shortcut: WP:AWB

AWB Developers
MaxSem Mets501 Reedy Boy Kingboyk Martinp23 AWB was created by: Bluemoose (retired)

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 GPL license (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.

Contents 1 Rules of use 2 Versions 3 Using this software 3.1 (1) Register 3.2 (2) Download 3.3 (3) Get started 4 Having problems? 5 User manual 6 Database Scanner 7 API 7.1 Plugins 8 Tips and tricks 9 Getting the sources 10 Notes and references 11 See also 12 External links

[edit] Rules of use

• Check every edit before you save it.
• 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 minor 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.

[edit] Versions

[edit] Using this software

[edit] (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.

[edit] (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 (download .NET framework).

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

[edit] (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.

[edit] 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).

[edit] User manual

Main article: Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/User manual

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Plugins

Main article: Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/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.

[edit] 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" means it is on a word boundary; this stops it on matching words that correctly contain "thier".
• 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 Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Settings for a list of useful settings you can use with AWB.
• A newline is represented by \r\n when doing find and replace. ^[1]
• 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.

[edit] Getting the sources

AutoWikiBrowser is licensed under the GPL (see the license file). To get the sources, you need read access to the sourceforge SVN server with a SVN client program.

If you would like to use the latest source release, TortoiseSVN is recommended software, and a quick guide for which is included below.

After installing TortoiseSVN, create a folder AWB (or whatever name you prefer) and right click in the folder, and select "SVN Checkout...". In the dialog window that appears (titled "Checkout") enter https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/autowikibrowser for the field URL of Repository. Check that the directory beneath is correct. You should then get the sources from the Sourceforge SVN server. When new sources become available execute "SVN Update" from the context menu of your AWB folder. You are not automatically notified of new versions, if you use AWB on a regular basis, and want to use the source version, check this daily, and build a new release version if there are changes. That way you are up to date with all bug fixes and new features.

Please note that you cannot commit sources back to the sourceforge server by using this method (this is called "anonymous access" or "anon access" for short). You would need to be registered as a project developer for this.

When you execute a "SVN Update", the software will download a change list, and then check the files that are present in the AWB folder, before downloading any new or updated files that may be needed.

If you would like to use the sources to run the latest source version, you will need to compile these yourself. You will need a copy of Microsoft Visual C# Express Edition, or a more complete version of the Visual Studio 2005 suite, such as Professional. Browse to the second AWB folder, and run the Visual Studio Solution. When the IDE has loaded, select release rather than debug (next to the green forward arrow). On the solution explorer on the right hand side, right click on the solution, and select build solution. Visual Studio will now turn the source files into the required files to run AWB and IRC monitor. Back in the AWB folder, browse to bin\release, and copy AutoWikiBrowser.exe and WikiFunctions.dll from the folder to where you run AWB from. Go back up 3 levels, and open the IRCmonitor\bin\release and copy IRCMonitor.exe to the directory with the AWB you run.

If you have command line SVN installed on your pc, it is as simple as typing svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/autowikibrowser

That would put it in a folder called autowikibrowser in the default location. If you wanted to specify a location to copy it to, you would append the command with the location, e.g. svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/autowikibrowser d:\pathtofile

You can view all SVN changes in the SVN Revision Log.

[edit] Notes and references

1. ^ Note, this is because of the way the Microsoft components work. When using other tools with, for example, Firefox, a newline may be represented by \n.

[edit] See also

• MWiki-Browser
• IRCMonitor

[edit] External links

• Project home on Sourceforge
• Browsing the sources on Sourceforge
• Regular Expression Language Elements from the .NET Framework Developer's Guide in the online MSDN documentation of Microsoft.