In an effort to combat linkrot, DASHBot crawls Wikipedia articles looking for articles with acceptable archives in the Internet Archive.
How DASHBot works edit
DASHBot searches a page for {{Cite Web}} templates with urls with no archive. It then queries the Internet Archive for archives closest to the accessdate parameter (and within a window of ± one month).
Features in Development edit
- A database log of #wikipedia-en-spam, to infer the first usage date of a URL without an accessdate.
Done A History Searcher to infer an access date by combing articles' histories for the first usage dates of a URL.
- Integrating Webcitation.org as an alternative to the Internet Archive.
- Bare URL archiving.
- On-demand archiving.
- Live archiving (the bot would theoretically archive a page as soon as it is added).
Settings edit
Some of the Bot's settings can be changed here: /Settings.yaml. The bot reads the page every time it starts the archive operation.
Keeping DASHBot away from an article edit
Keeping DASHBot from editing an article is easy. Simply put the following template anywhere on the page:
{{Bots|deny=DASHBot}}
If there is already a {{Bots}} template on the page, you may edit it to display the following:
{{Bots|deny=<other_bot_name>,DASHBot}}
DASHBot needs to be turned off edit
Please edit (or get an administrator) to edit this page: /Shutoff. The bot will stop within 3 edits.