In the digital era, artificial intelligence has revolutionized many industries, including writing. Businesses and individuals use high-tech resources and tools to produce high-quality business content. Innovative tools such as AI and machine learning have modernized copywriting. Robot writers use algorithms to create engaging posts concerning the company’s products and services. Consequently, bots are carrying out specific Wikipedia editing tasks and sorting out vandalism in articles. As Wikipedia gained popularity, the number of contributions increased. It became hectic and demanding for the editors to review each piece in depth, revert the edits and make relevant changes. Let’s suppose the Wikipedia page received 180 improvements every minute; humans could not work with high efficiency. It broke down their energy and affected their quality of work. At this stage, a software robot, an automated tool, emerged that quickly edits countless articles and produces excellent articles. Various autonomous computer programs operate different tasks as they form a big part of the Wikipedia community. They remain active and help keep the site running smoothly.
How Bots play an Active role on Wikipedia
According to research by Dr. Jeff Nickerson, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, 1,601 bots on Wikipedia. are involved with managing significant editorial and administrative functions. The software robots facilitate review management services by operating various editorial tasks. It comprises making numerous edits to the articles uploaded on the Wikipedia site. They highlight vandalism and remove damaging content. Erase the articles that have biased and hostile language. The other editing function comprises researching content with unauthentic sources or articles having multiple sources.
Furthermore, the bots track the tags on the articles reminding editors to add reliable citations to articles. Some bots are involved with writing tasks as well. Some Wikipedia researchers found short and standard articles on the site. The articles had well-researched content along with accurate demographic statistics. The articles were written by a robot that readers widely appreciated.
The administrative functions include organizing lists and entries and sending welcome messages to new editors. Consequently, the software robot acts upon the commands delegated by an editor or writer. However, the bots are not entrusted with complete administrative rights, such as deleting or outlawing pages that violate Wikipedia policy and blocking editors. Today, the top bots on Wikipedia are effectively performing their editing roles on Wikipedia pages.
The most active bots on Wikipedia
- Cydebot
According to the Wikipedia page writing service, the most effective bot on Wikipedia is Cydebot; the bots remove categories of articles that lack authentic content, references, and biased language. Moreover, they keep the Wikipedia page active and updated by adding accurate content and an updated and organized checklist of articles, data, and statistics to the wiki page. Cydebot was created and operated by a software engineer called Clyde Ways, who has been editing Wikipedia pages for 13 years.
Since editorial tasks could be tiresome for human editors, employing robot software will automate the tedious editing tasks. Thus, simplifying the editing procedures, keeping pages updated, and improving the quality of Wikipedia pages.
- Yobot
The robot software was created by Wikipedia administrator Magioladitis. He was a semi-automated wiki editor that developed the software. The essential feature of this bot includes handling regular editing tasks. The software tag articles if it has fictional characters, remove unauthentic content or references, and replace specific content with different sections pages of the article. Consequently, it edits the articles to maintain the flow of content, accuracy, and transparency. The Wikipedia bot has accomplished 3.7 million edits with high competency and skill.
- ClueBot NG. T
It is another effective robot software that successfully combats a significant concern of Wikipedia articles. ClueBot NG can handle all malicious content. It detects the article’s vandalism and foul language and automatically drifts back the offensive wiki content. The software instantly evaluates the content’s quality and disproves it for publication. The vandalism detection algorithm software was created by Chris Breneman (Crispy1989) and Cobi Carter (Cobi) in 2014. Since its creation, the software has reverted over two million vandalized edits.
- RussBot
Community editors regularly perform several editing tasks including reviewing an article and adding a notability tag or editing the content with marketing jargon or lacking organization and structural errors. Since editing numerous company pages or articles on Wikipedia could be time-consuming and strenuous for editors, robot software provides excellent facilitation.
RussBot executes numerous tasks, such as repairing double redirects. Sometimes when readers search for a proposed page, they automatically find another page instead of the required one. Such pages are uninvited and make navigation of the site more difficult. To eliminate the double redirects issue, RussBot helps to avoid the middleman. Instead, it directly sends links to the company or website.
Another essential function of Russ Bot is to bypass links to Wikipedia articles with the ambiguous title. The article’s subject and topic lack significant coverage, and the chosen material lacks authentic sources. The software directly sends links to the specific article.
Russbots easily and automatically fix double redirects. Consequently, human editors can spend their time on other tasks that cannot be automated. However, bots cannot set a double redirect if the company fully protects the redirect page. Since its creation, the software has made nearly 1.1 million edits. R’n’B, the Wikipedian editor from Virginia, USA, operates russBot. Editors have widely praised the software for operating disambiguation and anti-vandalism tasks.
- COIBot Reports
As millions of people or companies edit pages regularly, much of the content lack objectivity and authenticity. The prime goal of COIBot Reports is to identify the elements of conflicts of interest in the article. It monitors a user’s username on Wikipedia. For instance, it analyzes whether the username similar to the name of the page the user is editing. The username is identical to the external links a user has added to the content.
Moreover, the software also tracks edits that the software has been instructed to follow, such as specific username patterns, external link patterns, and domain of user IP. Moreover, COIBot also works closely with other wiki bots and tracks all link additions concerning the content areas. Having access to the database of link additions created by other wiki bots, COIBot can save reports on data recovered from the database. Hence, the bot has done 800,000 edits, highlighting conflicts of interest issues to Wikipedia pages.
- CmdrObot
CmdrObot is involved with fixing common grammatical errors in the article. For instance, the correction bot makes various edits to the content, having misspellings, correcting the capitalization for the abbreviations, and eliminating unnecessary spaces between words and sentences. The bot fixes spelling errors, capitalizes proper nouns, and repairs malformed HTML.
- Tbot
Another necessary bot is Tbot. The software bot helps with maintenance, such as fixing broken links and tagging pages for deletion. Tbot has been running since 2006 and has made over two million edits.
To recapitulate
The Wikipedia page is a global informative site that enables writers and editors to write and edit articles maintaining the notability standards of the content. Over the years, contributions have extensively increased on Wikipedia and many frenzied editors. Too much editing drained their energy. To facilitate the community editors, the Wikipedia team delegated editing and administration to software robots called bots. The editing tasks of bots include identifying policy violations and removing junk and vandals from the article. Fixing citations and references in the content. The bots tag articles having grammatical and structural errors. The page maintenance implies the bots monitoring the pages regularly. They keep the Wikipedia page active and updated by adding accurate content, statistics, and company data to the business page. The bots also send user notifications to the editors regarding redirecting pages or generating new content following Wikipedia rules. Hence, software robots successfully carry out specific tasks that are time-consuming and more demanding for human editors. These software bots comprise the Wikipedia community and play a significant role in keeping the site running smoothly.