Wikipedia bots

Wikipedia bots are Internet bots (computer programs) that perform simple, repetitive tasks on Wikipedia. One prominent example of an internet bot used in Wikipedia is Lsjbot, which generated millions of short articles across various language editions of Wikipedia.[1]

Bots are computer scripts that operate in an automated or semi-automated way and can perform certain actions more efficiently than humans.

Activities

Computer programs, called bots, have often been used to automate simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles, such as geography entries, in a standard format from statistical data.[2][3][4] Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).[5]

Anti-vandalism bots like ClueBot NG, created in 2010 are programmed to detect and revert vandalism quickly.[3] Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet incident in July 2014 when it was reported edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government.[6]

Bots on Wikipedia must be approved before activation.[7]

A bot once created up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia in a day.[8] According to Andrew Lih, the current expansion of Wikipedia to millions of articles would be difficult to envision without the use of such bots.[9] The Cebuano, Swedish and Waray Wikipedias are known to have high numbers of bot-created content.[10]

Types of bots
Icon that typically represents the bot user right on Wikipedia

One way to sort bots is by what activities they perform:[11][12]

See also

References
  1. Gulbrandsson, Lennart (17 June 2013). "Swedish Wikipedia surpasses 1 million articles with aid of article creation bot". Wikimedia Blog. Archived from the original on 24 February 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  2. "Wikipedia:Bots". English Wikipedia.
  3. Daniel Nasaw (July 24, 2012). "Meet the 'bots' that edit Wikipedia". BBC News.
  4. Halliday, Josh; Arthur, Charles (July 26, 2012). "Boot up: The Wikipedia vandalism police, Apple analysts, and more". The Guardian. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
  5. Aube (March 23, 2009). "Abuse Filter is enabled". Wikipedia Signpost. Retrieved July 13, 2010.
  6. Aljazeera, July 21, 2014, "MH17 Wikipedia entry edited from Russian Government IP Address". "MH17 Wikipedia entry edited from Russian government IP address". July 21, 2014. Archived from the original on November 16, 2016. Retrieved July 22, 2014.
  7. Wikipedia's policy on bots
  8. Jervell, Ellen Emmerentze (July 13, 2014). "For This Author, 10,000 Wikipedia Articles Is a Good Day's Work". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 18, 2014.
  9. Andrew Lih (2009). The Wikipedia Revolution, chapter Then came the Bots, pp. 99–106.
  10. Wilson, Kyle (11 February 2020). "The World's Second Largest Wikipedia Is Written Almost Entirely by One Bot". Vice.
  11. Zheng, Lei (Nico); Albano, Christopher M.; Vora, Neev M.; Mai, Feng; Nickerson, Jeffrey V. (7 November 2019). "The Roles Bots Play in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 3 (CSCW): 1–20. doi:10.1145/3359317.
  12. Dormehl, Luke (20 January 2020). "Meet the 9 Wikipedia bots that make the world's largest encyclopedia possible". Digital Trends.
  13. "This machine kills trolls". 18 February 2014.
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