On Wikimedia wikis, most bots are active on just one or a few wikis, and are subject to the approval of that wiki's community (see local bot policy). Approved bots are added to the local “botit” user group. The list of all accounts which are bots on any particular wiki is shown at Special:ListUsers/bot.

Bots which can operate on every Wikimedia wiki may be approved as global bots (see global bot policy). Bots approved this way are added to the “järjestelmänlaajuiset botit” global user group. The list of them is shown at Special:GlobalUsers/global-bot.

Local and global bots alike are granted the “bot” user right (this is sometimes called a “bot flag”), which permits them higher rate limits for MediaWiki actions such as editing pages, and allows their edits to not show up in recent changes by default.

Additionally, they are both exempt from some rate limits used to slow down web scrapers running against Wikimedia sites (see Wikimedia robot policy). As these exemptions can only be applied to global groups, a “paikalliset botit” global group exists, which is automatically synchronized with the local bot groups on every wiki.

See Manual:Creating a bot on mediawiki.org for full instructions.

See mw:Manual:Creating a bot#Programming languages and libraries for lists.