English

Bots vs. Wikipedians, Anons vs. Logged-Ins

Digital Libraries 2014-02-06 v2 Computers and Society Social and Information Networks

Abstract

Wikipedia is a global crowdsourced encyclopedia that at time of writing is available in 287 languages. Wikidata is a likewise global crowdsourced knowledge base that provides shared facts to be used by Wikipedias. In the context of this research, we have developed an application and an underlying Application Programming Interface (API) capable of monitoring realtime edit activity of all language versions of Wikipedia and Wikidata. This application allows us to easily analyze edits in order to answer questions such as "Bots vs. Wikipedians, who edits more?", "Which is the most anonymously edited Wikipedia?", or "Who are the bots and what do they edit?". To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such an analysis could be done in realtime for Wikidata and for really all Wikipedias--large and small. Our application is available publicly online at the URL http://wikipedia-edits.herokuapp.com/, its code has been open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1402.0412,
  title  = {Bots vs. Wikipedians, Anons vs. Logged-Ins},
  author = {Thomas Steiner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.0412},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

Poster at the Web Science Track of the 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2014), Seoul, Korea

R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:59:56.874Z