![]() ![]() ![]() The bot then fills in these sentences with the information from the machine-readable databases and adds infoboxes (like the sidebars seen on most developed biographies on Wikipedia), categories, and links to other articles as appropriate. Once this information is obtained, the next step is to write formulaic, generic, and reusable templated sentences with spots for specific information this will express, in text, the various facts for each article. The machine-readable database that Lsjbot used for geography based articles, for example, is called GeoNames. The next step in the process is to find machine-readable databases covering the domain these will provide the basic facts about each subtopic-foot, hand, face, etc.-to include within the articles. For instance the domain “body” would include “foot,” “hand,” “face,” and so on. From the random selection of these 1,000 results that Motherboard reviewed, the majority were surprisingly well constructed.Īccording to Johansson, his bot operates using the following basic principles: to begin, he selects a semantic domain-an area of meaning and the words used to describe it. Riley Huntley, a new global administrator, compiled a sample of 1,000 random articles that Lsjbot created. ” Vermont also pointed out that Lsjbot has made “more edits…than there are speakers of Cebuano.” “They have not taken over any project rather, they have simply disincentivized article creation with vast amounts of stub. “Bots are the product of people,” Vermont, a long-time global administrator who asked to be referred to by their Wikipedia username, said. ![]() Based on this, Morandini argued that bots have taken over the Cebuano edition from human editors. According to that same research, all but five of the edition’s top 35 editors are bots, with no human editors in the top 10. His creation is responsible for over 24 of the edition’s 29.5 million edits and according to research done by Guilherme Morandini, another global administrator, has created 5,331,028 of the edition’s 5,378,570 articles, or 99.12 percent of its article creations. The particular bot writing the Cebuano edition is called “Lsjbot” and was created by the Swedish physicist Sverker Johansson. While this may not seem like an issue, when the majority of an edition’s content is written by a single bot it can negatively impact the quality of the edition. While the English Wikipedia and other editions use these tools to perform repetitive and otherwise mundane tasks, some editions have taken to using them to write content. According to a paper published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction journal, there are approximately 1,601 of these bots in existence across Wikipedia editions. The English edition, by comparison, has 1,143 administrators and 137,368 active users for over 6 million articles, at the time of writing.Īccording to research by Motherboard and comments by several global administrators, highly trusted users who specialize in combating vandalism across Wikipedia editions, this is due to the use of bots, automated tools that primarily carry out repetitive and mundane tasks, but can also be used to generate Wikipedia entries. ![]() Despite having over 5.37 million articles, it has only 6 administrators and 14 active users. Its positioning is rather peculiar given that, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are only approximately 16.5 million speakers of the language in the Philippines. The Cebuano Wikipedia is the second largest edition of Wikipedia, lagging behind the English version by only just over 630 thousand articles and ahead of the Swedish and German editions by over 1.64 and 2.98 million articles, respectively. ![]()
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