Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Apparent Mewbot misbehavior/reply (5)

What a bot sees when it edits a page is the same as what a human editor sees in the edit box. Just the wikitext. The wikitext of the page was correct, the problem was in one of the templates, so the bot couldn't spot anything. Besides, a bot can only recognise what it's programmed to recognise, and MewBot runs either some custom search-and-replace script (which looks for a certain wikitext and replaces it with something else) or it adds new inflected forms. It doesn't try to parse or understand the page in any way. That would make the bot very complex, and as far as I know only Autoformat actually does that, because it needs to.