wiki bots – one key to the success of wikipedia
April 4th, 2008
Wikipedia has gain such a big success under massive human administration. One amazing feature coming with wikipedia is fairly fast response by the administrators – they continuously track the changes and keep the content in good shape.
One interesting helper in wikipedia is Wiki bot, who can be automate repetitive tedious jobs (source types of wiki bots) :
- tagging/categorizing wiki articles, e.g. alai bot
- importing content from outside wiki, e.g. history of wikibots
- detecting spam and vandalism in wiki page, e.g. voAbotII
- checking for spell errors, e.g. cmdObot
I just went to wikipedia and randomly selected 10 pages, and there are 7 edited by bots (find “bot” in the editor’s name), and the rest 3 has fairly short history (no more than 20 revisions). Dodge, Nebraska is one of my favorite example which was massively edited by bots.