User:ChoreBot

This user account is a bot operated by William Pietri (talk). It is used to make repetitive automated or semi-automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually, in accordance with the bot policy. This bot does not yet have the approval of the community, or approval has been withdrawn or expired, and therefore shouldn't be making edits that appear to be unassisted except in the operator's or its own user and user talk space.
Administrators: if this bot is making edits that appear to be unassisted to pages not in the operator's or its own userspace, please block it.

Background

There are some things that need to get done that nobody likes doing.

In a situation where you live with other people, one way to make sure all that gets done is a chore wheel. It's a simple paper device that lets you list the chores (like taking out the trash or cleaning the bathroom) and the people on two circles of different sizes, tacked together at the center. Every week, each person does the chore next to their name. Every week, you turn the wheel one notch, so eventually everybody does all the chores.

You can see some examples elsewhere on the web:

Chore wheels work well because they are simple, fair, and very visible ways to divide up responsibilities.

About this bot

In that spirit, this bot lets you make a public pledge that you'll do some sort of Wikipedia chore on a regular basis. Why would you do that? Mainly because you think somebody should do the work, and you want a reminder to do a piece of it every so often. And partly because when you make it obvious that you're pitching in, others will feel better about taking on Wikipedia chores.

For starters, this bot will be very simple. It will send you an email every so often with a reminder. Eventually there could be all sorts of fancy features, like tracking activity, making pretty reports, sending you to areas that most need work, and anything else you suggest on the talk page.

Usage

To register with ChoreBot, just pop something like this into your user page:

{{User:ChoreBot/Registration
| tasks=[[:Category:Articles that need to be wikified|]]
}}

This user uses ChoreBot to remind them to work on Articles that need to be wikified every Saturday.

And you'll end up with a box like the one on the right. Or no box at all if you'd like. You can find out more about the options on the template page.

Also make sure that you've registered an email address with Wikipedia on Special:Preferences. ChoreBot will never see that email, so you'll still be safe from spammers.

Note that this bot isn't actually working yet, but if you happen to come across this, feel free to register anyhow. You can be a founding user!

Technical architecture

For starters, this will be a simple Java app running on a collocated server of mine. It will use some sort of connection to the new(ish) MediaWiki API when possible, hopefully an off-the-shelf one. For persistence I'll either use Hibernate (Java) or Prevayler. I expect that sending of emails would be entirely through the "Email This User" functionality.

History

October 2007 - Proposed on the wikien-l mailing list: [1] [2]
November 2007 - Fleshed out template and bot page so that I can apply for approval.

Emergency shut-off

Emergency robot shutoff button

Administrators: Use this button if the bot is malfunctioning. (direct link)

Non-administrators can report misbehaving bots to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.