On Sun, 2 Nov 2003, Rob Hooft wrote:
What you describe is one of the robots implemented in the pywikipediabot, available via sourceforge.net: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywikipediabot
That software does handle redirects and a lot of other wikipedia-intricacies. If you have any other wishes, we can have a look at them. You're welcome to join the team and bring in your experience.
Having some experience with Rob's bot (and done some minor coding on it too), I can say that I can recommend it. It is currently being used on nl: (by Rob and me) and on da: (by Christian List), while I have also made a run of it on fy:. For other languages, I would like to hear which languages would allow the usage of such a bot. If wanted, I can do a trial run on a smaller number of pages, so people can see whether it is running correctly.
The best thing would be to have an operator (or more) for each language, but if nobody is willing & able, I would not mind doing several other languages as well.
There are also some more bots there, among them a bot that is used to help in doing disambiguation (this one I have been running on en: under username Robbot). It also contains a library (wikipedia.py) so it can be used for programming other automatic or machine-aided edits on Wikipedia as well.
Andre Engels