Much of the Editing Work on Wikipedia Is Done by Bots
February 13th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
Less well known is Wikidata, an information repository designed to share basic facts for use on different language versions of Wikipedia. Wikidata therefore plays a crucial role in lubricating the flow of information between these online communities.
Maintaining all this data is a difficult job. It requires significant editing and polishing, mostly involving mindless, repetitive tasks such as formatting links and sources but also adding basic facts.
So much of this kind of work is automated. Behind the scenes, automated bots scan Wikipedia and Wikidata pages continually polishing the content for human consumption.
But that raises an important question. How much bot activity is there? What are these bots doing and how does it compare to human activity?
