Help:Auto Wiki Browser

You can use this for automated edit and replace - but it is much more flexible than that. E.g. to change one category to another, to add a category to any page containing some text, to change the first example of text on a page add something to the start or end, create pages that don't exist with predefined content, delete pages, and you can step through it one page at a time (shows the wiki text with the changes to be made before you save it) or let it automatically save.

It is very powerful but it has no undo feature. So you need to be methodical and careful or you could do a big change to many pages and not be able to revert them except by visiting them individually and using undo - and - if for instance you were removing a category from them - you may not be able to even recreate your original list of pages to add it back in again, because the category now has no members. Though it does add all your changes to your contributions record, so you could (very laborously) undo chnages there.

All edits are done through your login and so are attributed to you. In the Wiki it just looks like it's one of your own edits unless you add an edit summary "AWB: ..." or whatever. You can set it to mark changes as minor edits and set what edit summary to show on each page. The minor edits option is very useful if you want to look for soemthing else in your contributions record as you can hide all the minor edits. However page creation and deletion is never shown as minor.

Getting started

You just need to download and use it right away. The bit about needing permission is only for people who want to use it to edit Wikipedia. Even a blocked user can use it to download pages, lists of pages, categories etc from Wikipedia. Only need special permission to write to Wikipeedia.

You get it here.

Connecting to EoB

If you want to connect to our Encyclopedia of Buddhism you need to use version 6 which was released on 15 sept 2018 - because the earlier version doesn't support the security certificates used on our site now that it is https.

It's in a zip. Unzip everything into a new folder - and find the .exe file inside - that's what you run and you can creat a shortcut to it on your desktop or whatever.

When it starts, to connect to EoB, go to Options >> Preferences >> Site and then choose custom, and enter encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/ and select https as the protocol from the drop down.

When you need to connect to the encyclopedia it will ask for your login and password. It remembers it so you only need to do this once.

Making the list of pages to work on

Now go down tot the section "Make list" - this is the starting point. You need to tell it a list of names to use. You can jsut make a list of names in a text editor Four Noble Truths
Karma
Wheel of Life
Highlight and ocpy, click on the list and use Ctrl + V or right click and paste and it will add them to the end of the list.

Or else - you can make a list e.g. choose Category as the source, and then Living people as the Category - and click "Make list" and it will add a list of all the pages in that category. It adds it to whatever you might have there already.

Set your options for the job

In options you probably want to untick the three automatic "fixes" at the top of that section. They are appropriate for Wikipedia but may not necessarily be what we want.

Now you to through the tabs see what you want to do. E.g. you may want to go to the More tab and either add or remove a category or change a category for all the pages in your list.

Choose what to skip

Go to "Skip" and you can choose not to do the action, e.g. if the page contains partiuclar text. Or not to do it if the page omits that text.

E.g. I just used it to add all the Living people pages that have the text "CODE|" on them to a new category Category:Check Video (don't need to go into why that was needed, just to show how powerful it is).

On this page you can also choose whether to change a page if it exists, or if it doesn't exist (useful for page creation), or both. For instance with the "not exists" you could use it to first generate a list of all the links on a page (in the Make list droplist, there's an option to do that) and then make a stub page identical page for each one for all those wanted pages in the list.

Start the job

Now go to the Start tab. Set the edit summary - and select the check box for minor edit. Otherwise all the jobs will show up as major edits in your contributions record. The minor edits can be hidden by choosing the option to hide minor edits whne looking at your contributions record. However page deletion and creation will always show as a major edit whatever you select here.

and click the Start button. It will now connect to the encyclopedia if it hasn't yet. At that point a new tab will appar called "Bots". But I recommend doing the first few replaces manually until you are sure it is doing what you inteneded, each time. It will go through the list, make the change, if there is any change in the text it hten pauses and waits for you to click "Save" or "Skip".

Bot

If you want to use the bot, go to the bot page, click "auto save" and because it's a small wiki then just choose to have a time delay of 0 seconds between each replace.

The replaces add jobs to the queue and if you do lots of htem - or if you replace a template used by lots of pages - then Encyclopedia of Buddhism may show a 503 error. That's because since we have little traffic so far, I've set it (for now) to do 1000 jobs on every page refresh. Otherwise we'd be clicking on pages for ages before it does everything and with normal traffic the job queue might take days to be completed. So just refresh a page, and you'll queue 1000 jobs. Doesn't take long to do them, if necessary repeat until it stops showing 503 errors.

Saving configurations

You can save the configurations from File >> Save Settings AS - so if you've spent some itme setting up AWB to do some particular task, it is all set up to do the same task again in the future if you go and open those previously saved settings.

When you exit it's good to go to File >> Save Settings as it doesn't automatically save your settings at the end of a session. That then means you start the next session as the previous one ended.

There are a number of other tweaks and things but those are the main points to get started.

Robert Walker (talk) 06:38, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

You just need to download and use it right away. You can use it to download lists of pages from Wikipedia - I'm doing that even as a blocked user.

The bit about needing permission is only for people who want to use it to edit Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser#(2)_Download