Semalt: Using Bots To Create Wiki Articles

Michael Brown, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, says that Wikipedia or simply Wiki is one of the websites that can boast to have a lot of articles written on various topics. Svenker Johansson, the Swedish university administrator, has defended the practice of creating millions of articles alone, saying that he made the wise use of robots and bots and got them approved by the senior authorities before using them on Wikipedia.

Johansson's software successfully created millions of articles on Wikipedia, and he became one of the most famous and prolific editors of this encyclopedia website. Now, this physics teacher is widely known as Lsj. He has created Lsjbot, an automated Wikipedia editor that has helped Svenker to create lots of Wikipedia articles for its Swedish version. So far, Lsjbot can create three million articles across a variety of versions of Wikipedia and racked up over ten million individual edits. Johansson says that the main task is to create articles about different species of animals and plants. There were times when Wikipedia had just a few bots, but Johansson claims that they are increasingly important nowadays and should be part of the machinery of Google and Wikipedia.

However, there are limits to what we can do with the bots. Of course, bots are important because they help perform a lot of work, as well as writing various articles on Wikipedia. Its English version has millions of published articles, and the bots are used to repair vandalism to a great extent. Anywhere in the world, they repair and update the old stuff, archiving existing discussions, changing the categories of Wikipedia articles and adding accurate date stamps to the manual problem reports.

The bots or robots go through special approval processes

Erik Moller, a deputy director and contributor of the Wikimedia Foundation, which is responsible for overseeing the website, has provided some examples about Cluebot. He says that a comprehensive policy governs the use of robots or bots on Wikipedia. He told the Guardian that not all bots are eligible for working on this giant encyclopedia due to their limited properties, features, and options. Most of the bots go through the tough approval procedure where the determinations are made by humans whether the tasks they perform are meaningful or not. Bots that rarely perform the unnecessary busywork are either disapproved instantly or shut down for a lifetime.

Moller also concedes that the structured data of Wikipedia and its projects are maintained in a variety of ways, which helps keep things updated. The practice of using robots and bots to create articles has its own drawbacks, but Johansson has defended his practice with strong points. He notes that the Swedish Wikipedia has more than 150 characters of The Lord of the Rings, but only a few belong to the Vietnam War. It means, this talented school teacher first created the bots that replace writers and editors. Then he discusses Tolkien and the white male nerds. It still looks difficult for a single person, but Johansson has used special Wikipedia bots to perform his tasks in a better way.