User:TTTBot
 | TTTBot is no longer active. It has been offline since October 2014. |
TTTBot creates and updates tables with information about software products in the OpenStreetMap wiki using data from Software2 templates. The bot is operated by User:Tordanik and runs on the FOSSGIS development server.
How to ...
... edit information about software?
Do not edit the tables directly - TTTBot will inevitably overwrite your edits the next day. Instead, update the information on the software's description page. For each OSM-related program, there usually exists a page on this wiki that has the program's name as its title and contains an infobox template (called "Software2"). This template is where TTTBot extracts the information for the tables from, and this is what you should edit.
A lot of information from the template won't even show up in the infobox itself, by the way, but it is still available for tables. To find out what the parameters of the template mean, have a look at Template:Software2.
How to add a new item to the table (generated by TTTBot)
Step 1: Create a new wiki page for the item you wish to add to the table.
- In the URL bar in your browser type: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/New-Page (replace New-Page with an appropriate name)
- This should create a new page. Click Create in the upper right corner
Step 2: Insert the code from the Template Page
- Go to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:Software
- Its best to right-click and open in a new tab as you will be referring to this page frequently
- In the left column is the code for the template
- Copy the code, then paste it into your new wiki page
Step 3: Edit the code details
- Now you can enter the specific details about the software you wish to include in the table
- Refer to the Template:Software page for information about the various lines and what they mean
Step 4: Save your page
- Before you finish, you may wish to add a few lines of text since the table data only displays a few items in a text box on the right of the page (the rest of the data is added to the table on the main page).
- Preview the page if you wish to see it before saving
- At the bottom of the edit page, add a brief summary of your contribution, then click Save Page.
- Congratulations! You've just added a page and a new item to the table data
... add new software to the tables?
If there is no page about the program yet, or that page contains no "Software2" template, then TTTBot cannot know about that program. In this case, you should create the page or add the template to the existing page.
It is possible that a program does't show up in a table even if it has a "Software2" template. That's usually because the software doesn't match the filter criteria of the table, defined by the "SoftwareTable" template. For example, Windows-only software (or software incorrectly categorized as Windows-only in the "Software2" template on its page) will not appear in a table of Linux applications. --Tordanik 22:47, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
... edit entire tables or add new tables?
If you want TTTBot to create a table somewhere in this wiki, place the template "SoftwareTable" there and wait for the next bot run. Similarly, if you want to change the columns of a table, or the selection of software that is supposed to show up in a table, you need to find the existing SoftwareTable template on the page and modify its parameters.
Technical background
The "TemplatesToTables" software used for this bot is implemented in Scala and accesses our MediaWiki's API through the Java Wiki Bot Framework.
Source code
https://github.com/tordanik/TemplatesToTables