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Monday, February 10, 2020

Bots that Make the Wikipedia Work

Quite instructive and interesting look at behind the scenes at the WP.  I can see this same approach being used for some things we tried to do with enterprise level knowledge.   I note that often when I make a positive point about the WP  I get negative responses.   It 'lies, deceives, steals, can't be trusted ...'     And yes, like everything on the internet is use must be carefully considered, based on use context.  Its flawed, contains opinion, as all writing does.  Yet I don't know of anyone who does not use it.   Wikipedia is now 19 years old, and I remember using it very early on.

Meet the 9 Wikipedia bots that make the world’s largest encyclopedia possible   By Luke Dormehl in Digitaltrends  

The idea behind Wikipedia is, let’s face it, crazy. An online encyclopedia full of verifiable information, ideally with minimal bias, that can be freely edited by anyone with an internet connection is a ridiculous idea that was never going to work. Yet somehow it has.

Nineteen years old this month (it was launched in January 2001, the same month President George W. Bush took office), Wikipedia’s promise of a collaborative encyclopedia has, today, resulted in a resource consisting of more than 40 million articles in 300 different languages, catering to an audience of 500 million monthly users. The English language Wikipedia alone adds some 572 new articles per day.

For anyone who has ever browsed the comments section on a YouTube video, the fact that Wikipedia’s utopian vision of crowdsourced collaboration has been even remotely successful is kind of mind-boggling. It’s a towering achievement, showing how humans from around the globe can come together to create something that, despite its flaws, is still impressively great.

What do we have to thank for the fact that this human-centric dream of collective knowledge works? Well, as it turns out, the answer is bots. Lots and lots of bots.  ... " 

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