Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-1474707-20140520221537/@comment-26975268-20140520234932

I don't know a thing about AWB myself, really, but I will gladly offer you my extensive pybot expertise. Pywikipediabot is another bot option for use on Wikia and other MediaWiki wikis/wiki farms that I personally find a bit more practical.

Just to be clear, the -search parameter, which could theoretically search for a specific term is long defunct — if it ever actually worked at all. If you want to search or find-replace, you'll have to do something like -start:! to go through all pages in ns:0 (or the "main namespace") starting with "!" looking for your search term. If you wanted to look in user talk pages, -start:"User talk:!"

And just for the record, yes, you can do what you want to do with pywikipediabot. pagegenerators.py will save a list of articles which match your search term (or regular expression, for a looser search) to a text file on your computer. Alternatively, you can do what I usually do — just run plain ol' replace.py and keep on hitting no, and just go to all the articles it lists for me.

Actually, scratch all that. The most efficient way to go about this is to for example replace "Lx01" with " Lx01 ", and have Template:Link fix include a category. That way, you can go through that category as slowly as you want to, within the wiki, and work through fixing whatever it is that needs to be fixing manually. This'd all be with replace.py.

Like Iggyvolz said, WhatLinksHere is also your best friend if you want to find links/transclusions of templates or pages within the wiki quickly and effortlessly.

You can read up on pywikipediabot at the Pybot Wiki, which I'll admit is currently a bit lacking, but still the most important guides are there, especially, installation guides for every operating system with a basic guide on how to use it. :)

If you have any questions about PWB, feel free to come to me, or drop a message for one of the other admin at the Pybot Wiki, there or here at Community Central, providing they're not busy.

However you chose to achieve your goal, I'm sure it'll be a helluva lot better than Special:Search. :P I wish you luck!