Thursday, July 07, 2005

Supporting a "bot"

The Wiktionary projects are very gratefull to the programmers of the pywikipedia bot. Particularly Andre Engels has been important in supporting this bot for the Wiktionary projects. He has programmed new functionalities that helped us work together more than what we would have done without it.

As can be deduced by its name, most people use the pywikipedia bot for Wikipedia projects. Many of the innovations have been programmed with Wikipedia in mind. The latest innovation allows you to be logged in several projecs at the same time. The interwiki bot makes use of this facility and when it finds that one project needs to be updated, it will do so. This enhances the quality of the bot dramatically.

Supporting a non-programmer like myself is a pain. It is therefore important that tools like tortoise work well. It means that a common baseline can be created. This in turn facilitate the analasys of error conditions. Today we finally got it to work. We had to remove the application and start it all over again.. This time it did download the pywikipediabot software from Sourceforge..

Really, Open Source rocks when there are friendly people like Andre ..

Thanks,
GerardM

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