Thread:JoshuaJSlone/@comment-5902226-20140605002722/@comment-131168-20140605141211

I am pretty far from a bot expert myself, but I'll tell you what I found and did over the last week.

I started searching Google with terms like wikia bot or wikia rename categories, and saw bits of information about bots that were used for various purposes, but one that I saw recommended a few times as good for a simple task like renaming a category was AutoWikiBrowser. I downloaded it and gave it a try, and while it has a lot of options I haven't touched yet, getting to the basics of what I wanted to do didn't take too long.

You can set it up by telling it what "project" it connects to (In our case Wikia, then more specifically helloproject). Then give it a login name and password. Then you can tell it to get a list of pages through various means, but I used the category option so it could be told to load up all pages of "Category:2009 additions" or whatever. You can then give it a task to perform on these pages, in this case replace all mentions of "Category:2009 additions" with "Category:2009 Additions". It then can load up the pages one at a time and show the change and allow you to hit Save and move on, or if you trust that it's working properly you can tell it to automatically do its task and save, working its way through the whole list.

There are a few reasons it's good to use a different account for these changes rather than my normal one. A big one is that on some lists like Special:RecentChanges you can switch between showing or hiding bot edits, since usually they're going to be a lot of boring. It doesn't seem like Special:WikiActivity has this option, but I don't know why. Another is just that it's good to be able to tell which edits were done "by hand".