The bots that help run Wikipedia
summary
Bots make about 50,000 edits every day on English Wikipedia and the ecosystem includes tools like the Internet Archive bot that replaces dead links, ClueBot NG which uses neural nets to catch vandalism, and Lsjbot which auto‑generates millions of small articles (Cebuano Wikipedia becomes ≈99% bot‑written). Code lives on GitHub, many bots run on Wikimedia cloud hosting, approvals happen via community bot‑approval pages, and surprisingly simple Python/PHP frameworks plus edit history data power most deployments.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (15)
- 0:00Wikipedia bots intro
- 1:10Defining bots online
- 3:43Wikipedia ecosystem rules
- 7:16Authorized vs unauthorized bots
- 8:20Bot activity in projects
- 9:02Article maintenance tasks
- 11:27Bots in discussions governance
- 13:14Bots combating vandalism
- 15:10Vandalism history and anti-vandal bots
- 16:56ClueBot NG AI detection
- 18:26Writing deploying Wikipedia bots
- 20:34Bots causing unexpected issues
- 21:17Bots in edit wars
- 22:22Cebuano bot controversy
- 26:20Rewards of writing bots
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