Up to now, the Fractured Fairfax wiki has been crafted almost entirely by hand. I mean, sure, I use templates for certain articles and I'm not above a little copy-and-paste if I'm cranking out a bunch of stub articles. When you type as slowly as I do, any tool you can bring to bear to make things go a little more quickly is welcomed and happily exploited.
I'd known for some time that really big wikis, like Wikipedia, use programs called "bots" to automate a lot of the routine and mundane maintenance type chores. I am wholly in favor of this; I've long said that a major point of using a computer is to get the dull and repetitive work out of the way, leaving the human free to do to the creative stuff that you can't automate.
Finally, I took action and did some serious investigation into what exactly was needed to create bots for the Fractured Fairfax wiki. Since I program in Python, the Python Wikipediabot Framework seemed like an ideal tool for me to use.
My first tentative steps with Pywikipedia were to use the framework to create empty month articles. I'd previously done this using copy-and-paste and manually editing the article templates to reflect the correct month and year, which is a fairly quick process if you do only one, but a real chore if you're doing several at a time.
So now I have month articles for every month from January 1866 to the present. All I need to do now is actually add some content to them.
Absolutely nothing you need to know about the wiki that tells you absolutely nothing you need to know about Fairfax County.
