How Robots Help Run Wikipedia
Baku, July 30 (AZERTAC). If any of the bears or I want to look up something on the internet, then we usually use Google to search of information - most people do. But where does that information come from. Usually, the first article in the list of Google results will be provided by Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the world`s largest encyclopaedia with over twenty-two million articles and more than four million in English. It is that big that if it were printed it would fill nearly two thousand volumes. However, one question that springs to mind is; if it is that big how is it maintained and kept up to date?
ClueBot NG resides on a computer from which it charges around the vast encyclopaedia detecting and cleaning up any vandalism almost as soon as it occurs. It is only one of several hundred bots patrolling Wikipedia at any given time. ClueBot NG`s role in repairing the Supreme Court article shows how these bots have become an indispensable part of the Wikipedia project.
The English language version of Wikipedia passed the four million articles mark this month. It contains an estimated two-and-a-half billion words - equivalent to millions of pages. It is fifty times larger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Wikipedia was founded in 2001, and the next year, the first bot created about 30,000 articles - at the rate of thousands per day - on individual towns in America. The bot pulled data directly out of the US Census. The articles read as if they had been written by a robot. They were short and mechanical and contained little more than strings of demographic statistics. But once they had been created, human editors took over and filled out the entries with historical details, local governance information, and tourist attractions. In 2008, another bot created thousands of tiny articles about asteroids, pulling a few items of data for each one from an online NASA database.
Today, the Wikipedia community remains divided on the value of bot-written entries. Some administrators say a stub of an article listing only a few points of data is of little value; others say any new content is good.
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