The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: Metaplasticity

Automatic or Manually Assisted: Automatic collection, supervised changes

Programming Language(s): PHP

Function Overview: API interface and scraping bot for a web program in development: Metaplasticity.

Edit period(s):Continuous

Already has a bot flag (Y/N):N

Function Details: An interface for a larger program that will access and scrape neuroscience-related data from wikipedia. Its function will be merely to gather data through queries.

How often will you be hitting the API and what will you primarily be pulling? --MZMcBride (talk) 22:59, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a link to this project? Also, please note that if you plan on having the bot edit, multiple users may not use it to edit per the Username policy, which states that only the maintainers of the bot may share accounts. Nakon 04:31, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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Hello, and thanks for your replies/queries. Apologies for the delay in my reply. Was having some vacation time.

MZMcBride: My primary interest will be in grabbing the internal and external links for particular wikipedia entries. I will also be grabbing the number of edits for particular entries. I am building an interactive knowledge visualization of the information relating to the neurosciences, and I am interested in initially representing both the connections between topics as well as the activity that exists within topics. The application shouldn't be hitting the API too often, as I will be implementing a database for the results of all previous queries to speed things up over time.

Nakon: I have a domain for this project (http://www.metaplasticity.com), but I haven't parked anything there yet as the project is still in the early stages. The project is being written in Flex/Actionscript. I have been querying the API using PHP, but the interaction with the visualization is sluggish because of the necessary repeated calls to the API to grab the links and other information (the cap is ten links per query as you know). Having a bot would speed things up for the user. Editing will not be necessary; I hadn't thought things through entirely at the time of my application.

I look forward to your replies.--Metaplasticity (talk) 21:35, 2 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'll look towards MZM and MrZ on making sure this meets WP:PERF since that is my only concern. If the bot is only making API queries, it would not need to edit. Would you mind it we blocked the bot from editing so it can only use the query function? MBisanz ^talk 02:35, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your reply MBisanz. Blocking the bot from editing would be fine.--Metaplasticity (talk) 18:13, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Bumping this. Looks ready for approval. Needs a bot flag (and an indefinite block). --MZMcBride (talk) 20:26, 5 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.