Note: LinkBot has been superseded by the Can We Link It link suggesting web tool.
"Can We Link It" has the following benefits above LinkBot, or feature parity with it:
- Uses almost identical internal logic as LinkBot.
- It also syntax checks articles.
- It works on the live version of articles (i.e. you can add a paragraph, and then see suggestions for the article including what you just added, whereas with LinkBot you might have had to wait months, because LinkBot used database dumps).
- It doesn't pollute talk pages with lists of suggestions.
- To some degree it learns from its mistakes.
- Suggestions are only supplied on-demand.
- It will make the links for you (you just say "yes" to a suggestion), whereas with LinkBot you had to manually make the links.
- If you reject a suggestion, it won't make that suggestion again for that article, whereas LinkBot would (because it had no way of definitively knowing that a suggestion had been rejected).
- As with LinkBot, the decision to make or not make a link is made by humans. The software only makes suggestions, and you decide whether you like the suggestions.
However there are some downsides as compared to LinkBot:
- People mightn't know there are suggestions for an article unless they go looking for them, whereas with LinkBot the suggestions "came to you" to some extent. Also as part of this, "Can We Link It" is hosted on an external site (it's an external tool, not integrated into the Wikipedia).
- It doesn't suggest reverse links (to deorphan an article) - i.e. LinkBot would suggest links to an article plus links from that article, whereas Can We Link It only suggests links from an article. In other words, LinkBot would actually suggest every link twice (once in the source article, once in the destination article). However, every link is also a reverse link - so if all the suggestions are processed, it'll have the same effect.
- Doesn't know about disambiguation pages. LinkBot would not suggest links to disambiguation pages, whereas Can We Link It will. This is to a very small extent mitigated by the fact that Can We Link It learns from its mistakes, so saying "no" to disambiguation link suggestion will stop that link from being suggested in future (but not suggesting the link in the first place would be better).