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Build Your Own Topic Bot

It’s been 10 days since the new Wikipedia IFTTT channel launch, and the response has been amazing. Our backend has seen almost 2.5 million requests for Recipe updates, from tens of thousands of unique users. In this post we wanted to do a quick hands-on guide showing one way IFTTT helps Wikipedians reach a wider web.

From drones to Florida news to aesthetic blogs to fake news to drones, topic-specific streams are drawing a big audience these days. Running one isn’t as easy as it looks, though. Content doesn’t create and curate itself. Unless you automate. Case in point, here at Hatnote, the fleet of special-interest Twitter bots built on Wikipedia and IFTTT just keeps getting longer. Here’s a selection from the last week:

• @WikiRedlist: Track the status of critically endangered species.
• @Wikidemics: Find out when doctors (PhDs, JDs, MDs, etc.) join Wikipedia.
• @NotableDeath: Reports recent passings of people with Wikipedia pages.
• @GreeceEdits: Updates on pages related to the Greece crisis.
• @SveWikipedia: Tweets about opportunities to collaboratively edit Wikipedia.
• @FlagsForDays: Updates on flag design and vexillology.

And you can have your very own with 5 simple steps. It only takes about 10 minutes, so let’s get started!

Step 1: Pick a topic

Before signing up for anything, first let’s sort out our goals. If you’re running an editathon or are an experienced editor, maybe you already have a topic or tracked hashtag in mind. For the rest of us, English Wikipedia alone has millions of articles and hundreds of thousands of categories. Think about your audience, but above all, pick something you’re interested in. If you’d like to pick something out of a hat, try a random article or try watching Listen to Wikipedia and seeing if anything catches your eye. Wikipedia excels as a source of random history and science, but also current events.

Here are some more fun entry points for browsing Wikipedia:

• List of lists of lists
• High-level categories
• Contents
• Recent changes
• Portals
  • Current Events Portal
  • All Portals

Step 2: Register your Twitter username

This is the hardest part. Finding and picking a name that is available. Twitter has a billion registered users. It might take you a minute or two to come up with a username that doesn’t have two tweets from 2011.

You’ll need to create a new Twitter account. Here’s a timesaver: Gmail (and other email providers) treat emails such as janedoe+anything@gmail.com the same as janedoe@gmail.com. So you can skip creating a new email and just use your existing one, such as youremail+yournewtwittername@gmail.com.

Step 3: Register for IFTTT

Even if you already have an IFTTT account, registering a new one makes the process go smoother and keeps your Recipes more organized in the long run. You wouldn’t want your bot’s recipes mixed up with your personal ones. You can use the same email trick from Step 2 on IFTTT.

Step 4: Connect the IFTTT Channels

Go to the Wikipedia IFTTT Channel and click Connect Channel. You should see a success message in a moment.

Go to the Twitter IFTTT Channel and click Connect Channel. Then, log in as the special-purpose account we just created to authorize IFTTT to post on its behalf. When you see the success message, you’re done!

There are many other channels worth exploring as outputs for your Wikipedia criteria. More on that later.

Step 5: Create the Recipes

Finally we get to the fun part. Choosing and creating the recipes. Here’s where you get creative, but there are three Triggers worth highlighting:

• Hashtag (docs) - Fires on edits with a #hashtag in the comment. Particularly useful if running an Editathon.
• Added to category (docs) - Triggers when an editor adds an article to a Category.
• Modified in category (docs) - Fires whenever an article in a Category is edited.

Depending on how articles have been categorized, to really cover a subject you may have to create more than one Recipe. Still, this is Wikipedia. If you see something that can be improved, don’t hesitate to try out creating or adding to a Category!

And that’s it! Your bot is operational. No backend work necessary, just some old-fashioned research on a new-fashioned encyclopedia. Here are some parting tips:

• Consider sprinkling in human commentary for a more engaging reader experience.
• Keep an eye on posting rate to make sure it’s not too fast-paced for your service or audience.
• If there’s not enough posts, add more Recipes!
• If you have an international audience, you may want to use interlanguage links, found at the bottom of the sidebar on the left of Wikipedia pages, to connect Categories from different languages’ Wikipedias.
• If you want to post to other channels, you can have a single recipe watch the Twitter feed and copy it over to Tumblr, Facebook, or other platform of choice.
• Twitter recommends you get and maintain real followers as soon as possible to ensure that your bot performs well in search rankings.

As always, as soon as you create your bot, tweet at us so we can add it to the list!

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