Update:

The perl script worked like a charm and was only something like 40 lines. If anyone else wants it, I can send it to them, but it has no user interface to speak of. In fact it has no interface at all, as everything including username, password, and the files to upload are hard-coded into the script.

I uploaded the first batch (vowel sounds) as [[User:Nohat]] as well as part of the second batch (consonants). Brion assigned the bot bit to [[User:NohatBot]] which was used to upload the rest, but due to a bug in the MediaWiki code, uploads by bots show up in Recent Changes regardless of the setting of hidebots. Any future automated uploading/editing I do will be done under the NohatBot username.

- David

David Friedland wrote:

I've finished writing the script, and I've been trying to test it on test.wikipedia.org, but uploads seem to be broken on the test wiki. After hitting submit, the page comes back as http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload with no content, and the file is not uploaded.

Also making testing difficult is the fact that the upload forms are different.

• David

David Friedland wrote:

...

I have ~200 files that I would like to upload to the en:Wikipedia. They are recordings of all the sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I don't want to upload them by hand, so I am hacking together a little libwww-perl-based script to upload them automatically under my username.

Before I do this, I want to run this by wikitech-l:

Should I register a separate account for use with my bot, like NohatBot?

I've set the useragent of my script to NohatBot/0.9b. Will it be blocked?

Finally, should I make the script available in case others want to do bulk uploads? If so, where?

Anything else?

• David [[User:Nohat]]

Thomas R. Koll wrote:

On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 04:36:27PM -0500, David Friedland wrote:

...

I have ~200 files that I would like to upload to the en:Wikipedia. They are recordings of all the sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet. I don't want to upload them by hand, so I am hacking together a little libwww-perl-based script to upload them automatically under my username.

upload.py from pywikipediabot.sf.net

Not aimed at you in particular, but in general: Please could people stop recommending those Python tools when nobody asked for them? If someone specifically asks if a script for something already exists, by all means, point these out, but I think we should stop making it look like they are in some way "official" or "supported" or anything else that makes people feel like they should be obliged to use them in preference to writing their own.

People should understand that hacking up small scripts can be a lot of fun, especially if you do it in your favourite programming language rather than being fixed to Python, and also you will understand the working of your bot much better if you write it yourself.

Thanks, Timwi