User:CorenSearchBot

This user account is a bot operated by Coren (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. The bot is currently inactive but retains the approval of the community. Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it.

This bot runs on Wikimedia Toolforge. Administrators: If this bot needs to be blocked due to a malfunction, please remember to disable autoblocks so that other Toolforge bots are not affected.

This bot patrols^[1] newly created pages in the main space, and matches the contents against a web search. Pages found to contain a significant portion of text taken from another web page are tagged (and categorized) for human attention according to some guidelines:

• Pages including little or no contents beyond that of the external page get a slightly more stern tag.
• If the page is a copy of another Wikipedia page,^[2] then the page is also tagged (but with a Wikipedia-specific tag).
• Web sites can be whitelisted as having a permissive license.
• If one of the accepted (configurable) attribution or permission tags is present on the page, then it is ignored.

If the 'bot modifies the newly created page in any way, then it will also leave a message on the creator's talk page, and on suspected copyright violations to bring attention to the apparent problem.

Additionally, the 'bot watches and/or updates a number of subpages under its user page for runtime configuration, directives and status information.^[3]

The CorenSearchBot is meant to function continuously, without direct human supervision.

CorenSearchBot is written in Perl and takes advantage of the new Mediawiki API for everything.

The source code can be perused here, but it's not pretty.