I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I've just written a bot, and Wikipedia policy says it should be approved before I set it loose.
I recently moved [[Brisbane, Queensland]] to [[Brisbane]], and then started fixing the links to those pages. I got through about 100 pages and I wasn't even a third of the way there, and I though "it would be easier to just write a bot". So I did.
The bot takes a list of article titles, and runs a Perl search and replace operation on the HTML escaped wikitext. The idea is to manually extract the list of titles from Special:Whatlinkshere, and then replace all links to the old page with links to the new page.
It will be running from username "Timbot". I've tested it on test.wikipedia.org. It runs in "trickle" mode, i.e. like this:
while (<ARTICLES>) { chomp($_); DoPage($_); if (time - $lastTime < $delay) { sleep($delay - $lastTime + $time); } $lastTime = time; }
I'm open to suggestions as to the setting of $delay. If anyone wants to see the rest of the code, I'll send it by private email.
-- Tim Starling.
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