We all know that Wikipedia is a medium that can be freely edited by anyone with an internet connection. This is the reason college professors and high school teachers forbid the use of Wikipedia as a trusted source in most situations. We have also come to think that humans are the only ones who are making edits to the world’s largest resource for all kinds of information. Alongside humans, automated bots account for the largest contingent of Wikipedia editors. This is obviously something that can either legitimize or trivialize Wikipedia depending on your viewpoint. As a professional Wikipedia editor I have learned the various bots and their editing activities in order to make sure that articles I create conform to the information the bots are programmed to edit.
Too Big to Maintain Alone
With over 30 million articles in just under 300 languages, Wikipedia is a behemoth of data and digital media. There are simply too many nooks and crannies found within the website to manage without the help of automated bots. There are even some pages that may rarely or even never get looked at by human editors. Because vandalism is so prevalent, automated bots tend to make most of the editing reversals found on Wikipedia. If not, you might believe that Charles Barkley, a famous basketball player, tallied 23 quadrillion points in his illustrious career. Even if Wikipedia turned to professional Wikipedia editors, there are just too many issues that need dealt with than humans can keep up with. It is simply much easier for bots to catch these errors than it is for humans.
Much of the work that bots do is centered on fixing links or sourcing articles correctly. This is the kind of boring, monotonous work that most humans do not have the time or desire to do, and the bots are fully capable of making these minute changes. But, what are the bots doing exactly and how do we know the bots are making the right changes? On top of that, how do we know how much work is actually being done by bots and how much of it is being done by humans?
Bots vs. Humans Statistical Data
The whole of Wikipedia is, on average, edited about evenly between bots and humans. The English version of Wikipedia is statistically the most human-edited portion of Wikipedia with over 95% of the changes coming from human fingertips. Wikipedia’s sister site, Wikidata, (which catalogs a wide array of different data from the internet and Wikipedia itself) can also be edited by humans or bots. The website maintains a list of approved bots with tasks that they can complete. Some of these bots can create simple pages for towns while others have the small task of updating sports scores.
Other bots, however, are not on Wikidata’s approved list and they still make edits at an astounding rate. It is unclear what these unapproved bots do and who commissions them. Automated bots make the lives of Wikipedians easier, but it might help to have some oversight. Someone could very easily create a bot whose sole job is to vandalize pages or include misleading information in some articles. With the size and scope of Wikipedia and its automated bots, it can be hard to catch any issues.
That being said, it’s clear that most bots are created benevolently and they perform their functions dutifully and effectively. Without automated bots, Wikipedia editing might become an impossible venture. Keeping things nice and tidy is hard enough with active and approved bots. Of course, for now, bots aren’t sophisticated enough to make wholesale changes to an article, but, in the future, humans may be entirely unnecessary to the Wikipedia editing process (but probably not).
Although you do not need a professional Wikipedia editor to create your article, it is always good to seek one out for advice. With the many different guidelines that govern the site’s conduct, you should make sure that the content you want created conforms. Creating content that does not conform will likely cause your article to be flagged, by human or bot, and lead to issues that would require you to hire a professional for anyway.
by Michael Wood – Michael Wood is an online marketing expert and owner of Legalmorning.com. He specializes in reputation and brand management, article writing, and professional Wikipedia editing. He is an expert Wikipedia editor and has helped hundreds of businesses and people post their articles to the site where they have otherwise failed. He is a regular contributor to many online publications including AllBusiness Experts, Yahoo, Business Insider, Business2Community, and Social Media Today.
Featured image courtesy of Globalism Pictures on Flickr. Some rights reserved.