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Lsjbot

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Lsjbot
Developer(s)Sverker Johansson
TypeInternet bot
WebsiteLsjbot on Swedish Wikipedia

Lsjbot is an automated Wikipedia article-creating program, or Wikipedia bot, developed by Sverker Johansson for the Swedish Wikipedia. The bot primarily focuses on articles about living organisms and geographical entities (such as rivers, dams, and mountains).

According to its description page on the Swedish Wikipedia, Lsjbot was active in the Swedish and Waray Wikipedias and is currently active in the Cebuano Wikipedia, and has created most Wikipedia articles in those languages[1] (between 80% and 99% of the total).[2]

During 2020, Lsjbot was only performing maintenance on the Cebuano Wikipedia, with no major article creation projects underway.[3]

History

Sverker Johansson, the developer of Lsjbot, shown with a tarsier

The program was responsible for 2.7 million articles as of 2014 (at a rate of 10,000 articles per day),[4] and 9.5 million articles as of January 2019 (at a rate of 4,000 per day),[2] two-thirds of which appear in the Cebuano language Wikipedia (the native language of Johansson's wife); the other third appear in the Swedish Wikipedia.

On June 15, 2013, the Swedish Wikipedia hit one million articles, the eighth language on Wikipedia to reach that goal. The millionth article was created by Lsjbot – which at that point had created 454,000 articles, almost half of the entire article count of the Swedish Wikipedia.[5] Lsjbot was also responsible for helping the Swedish Wikipedia become the second edition of Wikipedia to reach 2 million articles, which as of 2022 is the fifth largest edition of Wikipedia behind English, Cebuano and German.

In February 2020, Vice reported that Lsjbot was responsible for over 24 million of 29.5 million edits at Cebuano Wikipedia, now the world's second largest Wikipedia,[6] with bots comprising all but five of the site's top 35 editors and no human editors in the top 10. However, Lsjbot is no longer creating new articles at the Swedish and Waray-Waray Wikipedias. Sverker Johansson explained that "opinions shifted" within the Swedish Wikipedia community and Waray-Waray editors were unable to form a consensus about the automatic creation of articles.[3]

On the Swedish Wikipedia, since early 2017, around 900,000 articles written by Lsjbot have been deleted, due to a lack of adequate documentation or because of other reasons.[citation needed] Apart from these already-deleted articles, as of 26 December 2021, a further number of approximately 200,000 articles await deletion.

Overall, starting in 2017, there was an initial pace of approximately 20,000 to 40,000 deletions of Lsjbot-made articles per year, but since July 2020 the pace of deletions has greatly accelerated. In just one year, from July 2020 to December 2021, Swedish Wikipedia fell from 3.72 million articles to 2.79 million articles. Furthermore, since July 2020, the deletion rate has occasionally exceeded 5,000 per day.

Media coverage

Its operation has generated some criticism, from those who suggest the stub articles lack meaningful content and a human touch.[7] The Sydney Morning Herald compared the bot to Phil Parker, allegedly the most published author in human history, who has published over 200,000 books,[8][9] each of which is completed in less than an hour using computers.[10] Popular Science compared the bot to the announcement in July 2014 by the Associated Press that it planned to use bots to write articles.[4] Johansson countered attacks on his methods by appealing to problems of gender bias on Wikipedia, noting that if the bot does not write articles, "otherwise they're mainly written by young, white, male nerds and reflect male interests."[11]

References

  1. ^ The bot’s user page on the Swedish Wikipedia, translated to English using Google Translate.
  2. ^ a b "Wikipedia Statistics, Bot article creations only". January 31, 2019.
  3. ^ a b Wilson, Kyle (February 11, 2020). "The World's Second Largest Wikipedia Is Written Almost Entirely by One Bot". Vice.com. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
  4. ^ a b Main, Douglas (14 July 2014). "This Bot Has Written More Wikipedia Articles Than Anybody". Popular Science. Retrieved 13 December 2020.
  5. ^ Gulbrandsson, Lennart (17 June 2013). "Swedish Wikipedia surpasses 1 million articles with aid of article creation bot". Wikimedia Blog. Archived from the original on 24 February 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  6. ^ "List of Wikipedias". October 22, 2021.
  7. ^ Jervell, Ellen Emmerentze (13 July 2014). "For This Author, 10,000 Wikipedia Articles Is a Good Day's Work". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 24 February 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  8. ^ Cohen, Noam (2008-04-14). "He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2010-08-04. Retrieved 2010-08-03.
  9. ^ Ein Mann sieht Code Archived 2013-02-11 at archive.today, Financial Times Deutschland, 9 May 2008. (in German).
  10. ^ Bagshaw, Eryk (16 July 2014). "This is how Sverker Johansson wrote 8.5 per cent of everything published on Wikipedia". Sydney Morning Herald. Archived from the original on 24 February 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  11. ^ "Swedish Wiki vet sets new content record". The Local. 18 July 2014. Archived from the original on 24 February 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
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