This article is about Wikipedia bots. For the information page on Wikipedia bots, see
Wikipedia:Bots.
Internet bots that perform tasks in Wikipedia
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]
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
One way to sort bots is by what activities they perform:[11][12]
^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.