Bot

A wiki bot is a software program that interacts with a wiki as if it was a real human editor; the most common case is editing wiki pages. It typically must be coded very specifically to a content management system, e.g. wiki code, so it is not usually possible to simply use a generic bot against a new wiki. For instance, a Mediawiki bot is specific to MediaWiki (and possibly GetWiki).

It was a Wikipedia policy at some point that bot code should be kept secret [1]. As of 2004, there is at least one publicly available "Wikipedia robot framework" [2].

Harmless and approved wiki bots have been employed on Wikipedia and other large public wikis, mainly for maintainance and data-importing tasks. See e.g. w:Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots.

A vandalbot is a malicious wiki bot that acts like a human vandal, to blank, revert or garble page titles and content. Vandalbots may cause denial of service and heavy server load.

Several typical vandalbot attacks were launched against Recyclopedia (which is based on GetWiki) within a week of its launch. These blanked pages and moved them to random titles to maximize the difficulty of undoing the damage or tracking references to those pages.

The Consumerium Governance Organization must take a strong stand against the use of vandalbots or crapflood techniques to resolve political issues. If it is targetted by such tactics, it must be able to respond legally, politically and technologically in tandem, to stay as resilient as possible.