7 ms·

Half of the top 50 Wikipedia contributors are bots

75 points by lsb 15y ago

scythe 15y ago
It'd be cool to see how this was calculated. Though considering the amount of auto-spellcheck and similar that goes on, it's kind of surprising to see that half of the top contributors are human.
- davnola 15y ago
  The source is linked from the OP. Here it is: http://slightlynew.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-writes-wikipedia-information.html http://slightlynew.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-writes-wikipedia... The author draws a wonderful parallel between bots in the Wikipedia ecosystem and bacteria in the human body.
  - lsb 15y ago
    Thanks for your kind words! I was fascinated by that talk. And if you want the code + data, you can just xargs https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs.rb https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs... over all of your pages-meta-history.7z files from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110317/ http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110317/ or get the sqlite database from Infochimps from http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/entropy-per-revision-of-wikipedia-pages-beginning-with-m http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/entropy-per-revision-of-w...
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  All bots have to be registered, and there exist simple tools to get edit counts. You'd just have to copy the list of bots and write a quick script to feed the names into the tools. Sum up the results and divide by the total number of edits. You could also just get an outdated version with the work already done for you, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_bots_by_number_of_edits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_bots_by_numbe...
- Dinoguy1000 15y ago
  There are no general spellcheck bots (I would say there are none, but it's possible there are some that spellcheck within a very clearly defined area, under very specific circumstances). Spellcheck bots are actually a fairly frequent request, and are always refused.
tokenadult 15y ago
I'd like to know how many are plagiarists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plagiarism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plagiarism or persons who misrepresent their identities, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry especially after some infamous incidents http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/head_wikipedian.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/head_wikipedian.ph... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-11-01/Arbitration_report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20... of editors with a lot of trust in the Wikipedia editing community who were abusing that trust. I don't find it easy in the culture of Wikipedia to gain trust by referring to reliable sources and checking what those sources say. After edit: The phenomenon of edit wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars goes a long way toward explaining why most Wikipedians have had contributions reverted, as the submitted blog post reports.
- lsb 15y ago
  As I was manually going through the top 50 list, "Darius Dhlomo, 920829" seems like someone who was banned, based on significant copyright issues. Also, plagiarism is difficult, because there are a lot of articles based on the kernel of public-domain texts, of which citation is not required. And sock puppetry is difficult, because some people keep bots that do productive work, but if human beings have trouble sensing that, I imagine it'd be much more code than the hundred lines of code that it took to process this the first time: https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs.rb https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs...
- CoffeeDregs 15y ago
  Ohmigosh. Thanks for the link to the lamest edit wars. That was just a lot of fun. Who knew Caesar Salad could incite such controversy...
- woodall 15y ago
  Here is a list of shell accounts I found a long time ago. http://christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-024331;comments:1 http://christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-0243...
philthy 15y ago
"Over three quarters of contributions from registered users are from someone who's had a contribution reverted." Well this makes sense entirely since it is peer reviewed and the articles are a living ecosystem which are built off of and on top of prior submissions and versions.
- lsb 15y ago
  I approached that question from a purity standpoint: if you only limited Wikipedia to people who did things "right", where would you be? And the answer turned out to be that you wouldn't be very far. I think urban planners have found that neighborhood cohesion and community watches are far better than gated communities and lawless knifefights outside, and the online textual equivalent of community dynamics agrees with that.
  - philthy 15y ago
    Agreed, wonderful analogy. Also in response to the source article, what defines a post as a "bad contribution" does this mean it was totally inappropriate or just needed slight tweaking. Has the author ever tried to make a legit new wiki post? I've never successfully posted anything without having even the slightest peer review. Who cares if the posts are almost entirely contributed by bots, just about everything is becoming automated these days (stocks, banking, traffic, etc.) and with the peer review base Wikipedia has I doubt the doomsday of robots are going to smarten up and misinform us...
  - tokenadult 15y ago
    if you only limited Wikipedia to people who did things "right", where would you be? Although it's notionally possible that a first editor who got something "right" (factually correct based on reliable sources) was later reverted by someone edit-warring to score a point. Sometimes a particular edit makes Wikipedia worse rather than better. If NONE of my edits had ever been reverted (several have been), I would think that I wasn't trying hard enough to check sources and correct commonplace errors. However, it's not clear at the moment whether the editors with the lowest percentages of reverted edits are those who do the best edits, or just those whose prejudices (and topic choices) avoid scrutiny by the mob of other Wikipedia amateur editors. I am conscious of this issue because I was a professional editor and researcher to make my living long before most members of the general public had ever heard of the Internet, and because most wikipedians are so young and so devoid of editing experience that they readily mistake good edits for bad. I think urban planners have found that neighborhood cohesion and community watches are far better than gated communities It would be interesting to see citations to research on this issue, as well as the latest citations to research on forming online communities in which fact-checking and encouragement of careful scholarship become the group ethos. I live in a crime-free neighborhood with an annual block party and NO crime in a typical year, not gated, with good community cohesion, but also isolated from a lot of passers-by simply because it isn't a shortcut to anywhere else. Wikipedia is so exposed to the outside world, including spamming advertisers and propaganda agents of warring governments, that it may take more vigilance to protect than just an informal consensus among volunteer amateur editors.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
crikli 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots Learned something new today. I didn't have any idea Wikipedia was partially controlled by bots. I for one welcome our new NLP powered overlords. Based on that page, though, how are bots contributing? Editing, yes. Creating, how?
- ErrantX 15y ago
  The biggest editing bots tend to do template maintenance (so correcting formatting issues and adding dates to templates). Bots simply do tedious work (that would have to be done anyway) faster - so hence a big edit count. My bot (which notifies English Wikipedia of image deletions on Wikimedia Commons) edits about three times more than I do each month (and I am somewhere around #500 activity wise). The very top bot ClueBot NG does more than double the edits of anyone else per month; that is an anti-vandalism bot, it catches about 50% of vandalism on Wikipedia each month. So pretty crucial :) Cydebot (#2) does some sort of category maintenance (not sure what, never seen it before). SineBot (#5) goes around and signs peoples comments when they forget (handy beast). Basically it is just infrastructure; but because of the nature of the Wiki it is more visible than other forms of infrastructure :)
- lsb 15y ago
  Autolinking is tedious, but valuable, so it's a perfect thing for bots to do, especially for general topic links at the bottom of pages.
- JustinSeriously 15y ago
  Some bots auto-revert changes that are likely to be vandalism or spam, like if an anonymous user adds a link to a blog on a free blog hosting site. (Specifically, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XLinkBot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XLinkBot .)
wbhart 15y ago
Oh! The number of articles I have read lately where I have gone and looked up actual books and discovered that the wikipedia content is copied verbatim from the books, yet with sentences that do not correlate strung together in a way that results in totally incorrect information. And then there is the fact that for ages the Jean Claude van Damme article said he had killed 100 men with his bare hands {expletives deleted}. Many of the mathematics articles contain appalling errors. You post about the errors in the discussion page and the issue is totally ignored. There seems to be no way to work with the community process to get things fixed. I use wikipedia a lot for things that don't matter, e.g. as a structured skeleton for notes on a particular topic that I am writing for my own benefit and understanding. But as a project, I think it has basically reached its limits. There's no way to move it significantly past what it is now.
- xxpor 15y ago
  If there are significant errors, fix them yourself. There's no need to go to the discussion page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD
  - CJefferson 15y ago
    Except I find most of my changes get reverted, even if referenced or simply deleting incorrect and unreferenced information. I don't have time to enter a life-long battle keeping an article correct.
    - TikiTDO 15y ago
      Something does not compute there. If your changes are getting reverted, obviously someone cares enough to notice, so it follows that they should care enough to check the discussion. Are you sure you're not just getting hit by a bot? Maybe you did not tag your changes properly? If anything, there might be a problem that the admins should look at. I would like to see some of these changes you are talking about.
      - 15y ago
retube 15y ago
What is the motivation for this? Why would someone write a bot to add content to wikipedia?
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  Most of them don't add content. They do maintenance work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status
- T-hawk 15y ago
  Also gray-to-black hat spam with links. Just like the content farms that plague Google's results, they'll push in any low-quality content in hopes of trolling some clicks to their ad- or malware-laden sites.
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    These are pretty easy to spot, and they get banned very quickly.
csomar 15y ago
I think these are bots that add links (external) to Wikipedia by some Spammers. I have seen some people doing it.
- brazzy 15y ago
  I think most of those are probably officially endorsed bots that do things like correct common misspellings, crosslink between different langauge Wikipedias and do huge one-off tasks like category reorganizations.
  - Enlightenment 15y ago
    All of them are officially endorsed.
tptacek 15y ago
Before everyone freaks out about this, the bots that we're talking about are janitorial, doing things like add dates to wikitags added by human editors. You can see this right now; go find a page to add a (legit, please) {{clarify}} or {{who}} or {{where}} tag to. Add it without a date, and wait 5 minutes; Smackbot will date the tag for you. This is a good thing for obvious reasons. Similarly, I'm guessing the "reversion" stat here is misleading. Reversion isn't deletion; anything that moves content around the page is likely counted as well. Write a graf or two on any well-trafficked WP page and you'll probably see it moved around pretty quickly. More importantly, reversion isn't permanent. On any popular article, someone is bound to disagree with the merits of your edit. The normal way of things when I was wasting time at WP was, edit, revert, talk page, re-post copy.
- lsb 15y ago
  And that's genuinely valuable; it's helpful to know that someone's thought that this has been unclear for 2 days versus 2 years. The compressed diff will be quite small, but Wikipedia incrementally gets better. Have you ever taken too much penicillin? You'll lose some of your good bacteria and you'll get a fungus from opportunistic infections. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_candidiasis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_candidiasis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidiasis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidiasis for examples.) Same thing with Wikipedia. Bots are really helpful for regular maintenance.
- ErrantX 15y ago
  Honestly I am surprised it is only "three quarters"; I'd be unsurprised if it were close to 100%
alok-g 15y ago
While, strictly speaking, this is unrelated to this topic, something has been bugging me that I would like to bring to the attention of HN readers: BOUML is a free UML2 tool for C++, Java, Python and others. The developer, Bruno Pages, has stopped its development due to some issue with Wikipedia administrators. I attempted to get more information from Bruno but he is upset enough to not talk about it. The following is quoted verbatim from http://bouml.free.fr/ http://bouml.free.fr/ and is all I know: "Due to the continuous license violations, attacks and insults from people of wikipedia ( the worst of them were the administrators Bapti (commons)/ Bapti (fr.wikipedia)/ Bapti (de.wikipedia) , Dereckson (commons)/ Dereckson (fr.wikipedia)/ Dereckson (de.wikipedia) and Esby (commons)/ Esby (fr.wikipedia) ), I have decided to stop work on Bouml except to fix bugs. Bruno Pagès."
T_S_ 15y ago
The idea that a human and a program would use the same interface is a good one if your goal is to allow the humans to focus on adding domain knowledge and the machines to focus on the boring repetitive tasks. Consider it a design pattern, not an evil plot.
basseq 15y ago
The stat I found interesting is this one [citation needed]: while a majority of edits are done by few editors, most of the content is generated by either a) anonymous accounts or b) people who have contributed 2-3 times and haven't returned since. The editors, like the bots, represent maintenance edits. Keep that in mind the next time Jimmy Wales gives beaucoup credit to editors, or some super-user gets power-happy.

75 points by lsb 15y ago

It'd be cool to see how this was calculated. Though considering the amount of auto-spellcheck and similar that goes on, it's kind of surprising to see that half of the top contributors are human.

davnola 15y ago
The source is linked from the OP. Here it is: http://slightlynew.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-writes-wikipedia-information.html http://slightlynew.blogspot.com/2011/05/who-writes-wikipedia... The author draws a wonderful parallel between bots in the Wikipedia ecosystem and bacteria in the human body.
- lsb 15y ago
  Thanks for your kind words! I was fascinated by that talk. And if you want the code + data, you can just xargs https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs.rb https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs... over all of your pages-meta-history.7z files from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110317/ http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20110317/ or get the sqlite database from Infochimps from http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/entropy-per-revision-of-wikipedia-pages-beginning-with-m http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/entropy-per-revision-of-w...
redthrowaway 15y ago
All bots have to be registered, and there exist simple tools to get edit counts. You'd just have to copy the list of bots and write a quick script to feed the names into the tools. Sum up the results and divide by the total number of edits. You could also just get an outdated version with the work already done for you, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_bots_by_number_of_edits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_bots_by_numbe...
Dinoguy1000 15y ago
There are no general spellcheck bots (I would say there are none, but it's possible there are some that spellcheck within a very clearly defined area, under very specific circumstances). Spellcheck bots are actually a fairly frequent request, and are always refused.

tokenadult 15y ago

I'd like to know how many are plagiarists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plagiarism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plagiarism or persons who misrepresent their identities, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry especially after some infamous incidents http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/head_wikipedian.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/head_wikipedian.ph... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-11-01/Arbitration_report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20... of editors with a lot of trust in the Wikipedia editing community who were abusing that trust. I don't find it easy in the culture of Wikipedia to gain trust by referring to reliable sources and checking what those sources say. After edit: The phenomenon of edit wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars goes a long way toward explaining why most Wikipedians have had contributions reverted, as the submitted blog post reports.

lsb 15y ago
As I was manually going through the top 50 list, "Darius Dhlomo, 920829" seems like someone who was banned, based on significant copyright issues. Also, plagiarism is difficult, because there are a lot of articles based on the kernel of public-domain texts, of which citation is not required. And sock puppetry is difficult, because some people keep bots that do productive work, but if human beings have trouble sensing that, I imagine it'd be much more code than the hundred lines of code that it took to process this the first time: https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs.rb https://github.com/lsb/ugc-contributors/blob/master/mh-diffs...
CoffeeDregs 15y ago
Ohmigosh. Thanks for the link to the lamest edit wars. That was just a lot of fun. Who knew Caesar Salad could incite such controversy...
woodall 15y ago
Here is a list of shell accounts I found a long time ago. http://christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-024331;comments:1 http://christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-0243...

philthy 15y ago

"Over three quarters of contributions from registered users are from someone who's had a contribution reverted." Well this makes sense entirely since it is peer reviewed and the articles are a living ecosystem which are built off of and on top of prior submissions and versions.

lsb 15y ago
I approached that question from a purity standpoint: if you only limited Wikipedia to people who did things "right", where would you be? And the answer turned out to be that you wouldn't be very far. I think urban planners have found that neighborhood cohesion and community watches are far better than gated communities and lawless knifefights outside, and the online textual equivalent of community dynamics agrees with that.
- philthy 15y ago
  Agreed, wonderful analogy. Also in response to the source article, what defines a post as a "bad contribution" does this mean it was totally inappropriate or just needed slight tweaking. Has the author ever tried to make a legit new wiki post? I've never successfully posted anything without having even the slightest peer review. Who cares if the posts are almost entirely contributed by bots, just about everything is becoming automated these days (stocks, banking, traffic, etc.) and with the peer review base Wikipedia has I doubt the doomsday of robots are going to smarten up and misinform us...
- tokenadult 15y ago
  if you only limited Wikipedia to people who did things "right", where would you be? Although it's notionally possible that a first editor who got something "right" (factually correct based on reliable sources) was later reverted by someone edit-warring to score a point. Sometimes a particular edit makes Wikipedia worse rather than better. If NONE of my edits had ever been reverted (several have been), I would think that I wasn't trying hard enough to check sources and correct commonplace errors. However, it's not clear at the moment whether the editors with the lowest percentages of reverted edits are those who do the best edits, or just those whose prejudices (and topic choices) avoid scrutiny by the mob of other Wikipedia amateur editors. I am conscious of this issue because I was a professional editor and researcher to make my living long before most members of the general public had ever heard of the Internet, and because most wikipedians are so young and so devoid of editing experience that they readily mistake good edits for bad. I think urban planners have found that neighborhood cohesion and community watches are far better than gated communities It would be interesting to see citations to research on this issue, as well as the latest citations to research on forming online communities in which fact-checking and encouragement of careful scholarship become the group ethos. I live in a crime-free neighborhood with an annual block party and NO crime in a typical year, not gated, with good community cohesion, but also isolated from a lot of passers-by simply because it isn't a shortcut to anywhere else. Wikipedia is so exposed to the outside world, including spamming advertisers and propaganda agents of warring governments, that it may take more vigilance to protect than just an informal consensus among volunteer amateur editors.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

crikli 15y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots Learned something new today. I didn't have any idea Wikipedia was partially controlled by bots. I for one welcome our new NLP powered overlords. Based on that page, though, how are bots contributing? Editing, yes. Creating, how?

ErrantX 15y ago
The biggest editing bots tend to do template maintenance (so correcting formatting issues and adding dates to templates). Bots simply do tedious work (that would have to be done anyway) faster - so hence a big edit count. My bot (which notifies English Wikipedia of image deletions on Wikimedia Commons) edits about three times more than I do each month (and I am somewhere around #500 activity wise). The very top bot ClueBot NG does more than double the edits of anyone else per month; that is an anti-vandalism bot, it catches about 50% of vandalism on Wikipedia each month. So pretty crucial :) Cydebot (#2) does some sort of category maintenance (not sure what, never seen it before). SineBot (#5) goes around and signs peoples comments when they forget (handy beast). Basically it is just infrastructure; but because of the nature of the Wiki it is more visible than other forms of infrastructure :)
lsb 15y ago
Autolinking is tedious, but valuable, so it's a perfect thing for bots to do, especially for general topic links at the bottom of pages.
JustinSeriously 15y ago
Some bots auto-revert changes that are likely to be vandalism or spam, like if an anonymous user adds a link to a blog on a free blog hosting site. (Specifically, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XLinkBot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XLinkBot .)

wbhart 15y ago

Oh! The number of articles I have read lately where I have gone and looked up actual books and discovered that the wikipedia content is copied verbatim from the books, yet with sentences that do not correlate strung together in a way that results in totally incorrect information. And then there is the fact that for ages the Jean Claude van Damme article said he had killed 100 men with his bare hands {expletives deleted}. Many of the mathematics articles contain appalling errors. You post about the errors in the discussion page and the issue is totally ignored. There seems to be no way to work with the community process to get things fixed. I use wikipedia a lot for things that don't matter, e.g. as a structured skeleton for notes on a particular topic that I am writing for my own benefit and understanding. But as a project, I think it has basically reached its limits. There's no way to move it significantly past what it is now.

xxpor 15y ago
If there are significant errors, fix them yourself. There's no need to go to the discussion page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD
- CJefferson 15y ago
  Except I find most of my changes get reverted, even if referenced or simply deleting incorrect and unreferenced information. I don't have time to enter a life-long battle keeping an article correct.
  - TikiTDO 15y ago
    Something does not compute there. If your changes are getting reverted, obviously someone cares enough to notice, so it follows that they should care enough to check the discussion. Are you sure you're not just getting hit by a bot? Maybe you did not tag your changes properly? If anything, there might be a problem that the admins should look at. I would like to see some of these changes you are talking about.
    - 15y ago

retube 15y ago

What is the motivation for this? Why would someone write a bot to add content to wikipedia?

redthrowaway 15y ago
Most of them don't add content. They do maintenance work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Status
T-hawk 15y ago
Also gray-to-black hat spam with links. Just like the content farms that plague Google's results, they'll push in any low-quality content in hopes of trolling some clicks to their ad- or malware-laden sites.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  These are pretty easy to spot, and they get banned very quickly.

csomar 15y ago

I think these are bots that add links (external) to Wikipedia by some Spammers. I have seen some people doing it.

brazzy 15y ago
I think most of those are probably officially endorsed bots that do things like correct common misspellings, crosslink between different langauge Wikipedias and do huge one-off tasks like category reorganizations.
- Enlightenment 15y ago
  All of them are officially endorsed.

tptacek 15y ago

Before everyone freaks out about this, the bots that we're talking about are janitorial, doing things like add dates to wikitags added by human editors. You can see this right now; go find a page to add a (legit, please) {{clarify}} or {{who}} or {{where}} tag to. Add it without a date, and wait 5 minutes; Smackbot will date the tag for you. This is a good thing for obvious reasons. Similarly, I'm guessing the "reversion" stat here is misleading. Reversion isn't deletion; anything that moves content around the page is likely counted as well. Write a graf or two on any well-trafficked WP page and you'll probably see it moved around pretty quickly. More importantly, reversion isn't permanent. On any popular article, someone is bound to disagree with the merits of your edit. The normal way of things when I was wasting time at WP was, edit, revert, talk page, re-post copy.

lsb 15y ago
And that's genuinely valuable; it's helpful to know that someone's thought that this has been unclear for 2 days versus 2 years. The compressed diff will be quite small, but Wikipedia incrementally gets better. Have you ever taken too much penicillin? You'll lose some of your good bacteria and you'll get a fungus from opportunistic infections. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_candidiasis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_candidiasis and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidiasis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidiasis for examples.) Same thing with Wikipedia. Bots are really helpful for regular maintenance.
ErrantX 15y ago
Honestly I am surprised it is only "three quarters"; I'd be unsurprised if it were close to 100%

alok-g 15y ago

While, strictly speaking, this is unrelated to this topic, something has been bugging me that I would like to bring to the attention of HN readers: BOUML is a free UML2 tool for C++, Java, Python and others. The developer, Bruno Pages, has stopped its development due to some issue with Wikipedia administrators. I attempted to get more information from Bruno but he is upset enough to not talk about it. The following is quoted verbatim from http://bouml.free.fr/ http://bouml.free.fr/ and is all I know: "Due to the continuous license violations, attacks and insults from people of wikipedia ( the worst of them were the administrators Bapti (commons)/ Bapti (fr.wikipedia)/ Bapti (de.wikipedia) , Dereckson (commons)/ Dereckson (fr.wikipedia)/ Dereckson (de.wikipedia) and Esby (commons)/ Esby (fr.wikipedia) ), I have decided to stop work on Bouml except to fix bugs. Bruno Pagès."

T_S_ 15y ago

The idea that a human and a program would use the same interface is a good one if your goal is to allow the humans to focus on adding domain knowledge and the machines to focus on the boring repetitive tasks. Consider it a design pattern, not an evil plot.

basseq 15y ago

The stat I found interesting is this one [citation needed]: while a majority of edits are done by few editors, most of the content is generated by either a) anonymous accounts or b) people who have contributed 2-3 times and haven't returned since. The editors, like the bots, represent maintenance edits. Keep that in mind the next time Jimmy Wales gives beaucoup credit to editors, or some super-user gets power-happy.