The Wikipedia bot workforce! 🤖 🤖 🤖

In today’s IT industry history and curiosities: 🤖 🤖 🤖 the Wikipedia bot workforce! 🤖 🤖 🤖

For many people, Wikipedia is the epitome of organic, user-generated content. And to some extent, that’s true - all the major creative work is absolutely done by volunteer editors. However, not many know that there’s also a huge army of bots working for WIkipedia 24/7, performing all sorts of tasks. To name a few:

⚫️ preventing or reverting acts of vandalism by rogue editors, ⚫️ correcting grammar and punctuation mistakes ⚫️ organizing and cataloguing the entries, ⚫️ editing certain entries, like updating those based on data accessible via API.

Currently, there are almost 2500 different bots maintaining Wikipedia. As with pretty much everything else related to the service, most of them are user-written. You can’t just write any random program and make it edit Wiki - there’s an official Bot Approval Group that verifies the bots, determines if they’d be beneficial and, finally, grants them the needed access. A literal job interview for robots! 🤖 💼