User:CensusBot
Deactivated
This bot is no longer active on Wikipedia.
 | This user account is a bot that uses Pywikibot, operated by Logan-Census (talk). It is used to make repetitive automated or semi-automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually, in accordance with the bot policy. This bot was previously approved but has since been retired, and therefore shouldn't be making edits that appear to be unassisted except in the operator's or its own user and user talk space. Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it. |
CensusBot is a bot produced by the Commerce Data Service in collaboration with the U.S. Census Bureau. The main purpose of this bot is to update Wikipedia pages with the most up to date information available from the Census Bureau. Specifically, the bot does the following:
- Reaches out to the U.S. Census Bureau's API's to grab state/county total population values for the most recent year available. The API used is the U.S. Census Bureau Population and Unit Housing Estimates program[1]
- Creates population ranking for states in Census Bureau API response (exludes PR and DC)
- Loops through the content of the page to find the template containing the infobox and specifically containing the appropriate properties for total population and ranking
- If the data does not match (e.g., the year does not match or the value does not match or it is not a complete entry), then an up-to-date entry which is properly formatted will be substituted for the existing entry and saved to the page with a preset comment ("Updating population estimate with latest data from US Census Bureau").
This bot will be started manually, but in the future, the hope is to automate it once it has been further developed. It may be expanded to touch on other relevant information outside of just population values.
Source code for this bot is present on GitHub.