WikipediaTwitterbot

Gem for creating Twitter bots related to Wikipedia

Get Twitter API credentials

Create a twitter account for your bot and then register an app, and put the credentials in twitter.yml:

twitter_consumer_key: ohai
twitter_consumer_secret: kthxbai
twitter_access_token: isee
twitter_access_token_secret: whatyoudidthere

For more info, see https://github.com/sferik/twitter#configuration

Set up a database

Use this gem to create an article database, via irb:

require 'wikipedia_twitterbot'
ArticleDatabase.create 'your_bot_name'

Write your bot code

Now you can write a bot. Here's what a basic one might look like:

require 'wikipedia_twitterbot'
Article.connect_to_database 'braggingvandalbot'

class TrivialWikipediaBot
  def self.tweet(article)
    tweet_text = "#{article.title} is here: #{article.url}"
    article.tweet tweet_text
  end

  # adds random articles to the database matching the given criteria
  def self.find_articles
    options = {
      max_w10: 30,
      min_views: 300
    }
    Article.import_at_random(options)
  end
end

Article provides both class methods for fetching and importing Wikipedia articles and metadata, and instance methods for supplying info about a particular article that you can use in tweets. See article.rb for more details.

Make your bot run by configuring cron jobs to import articles and tweet tweets about them.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the WikipediaTwitterbot project’s codebase and issue trackeris expected to follow the code of conduct.