Research:Automated editing

Automated editing refers to the use of computational tools make changes to pages. This page discusses the types of automation employed on Wikimedia projects and discusses some of the issues automated editing poses for behavioral measures of human editors.

A full list of all bots can be found via PetScan which allows for exporting in a variety of formats:

• Active Bots, however you will have to manually remove blocked users which display as struck-through in the category.
• Inactive Bots, due to blocking or otherwise

Types of automation

Automated tools used on Wikimedia projects can generally be divided into two types, semi-automated human-computation tools ("cyborgs") and fully-automated robots ("bots").

Semi-automated human-computation tools

These tools mix human judgement with algorithmic support to get support a subset of wiki tasks.

Examples

Automated tedium

AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) is a semi-automated en:MediaWiki editor designed to make tedious repetitive tasks quicker and easier. It is essentially a browser that automatically opens up a new page when the last is saved. When set to do so, it suggests some changes (typically formatting) that are generally meant to be incidental to the main change.

Specialized tasks

Huggle is a semi-automated count-vandalism tool designed to make identifying and reverting vandalism faster and easier. Huggle uses computational classification strategies to flag edits that are likely to be vandalism, performs reverts and sends warning messages to "vandals" on behalf of the user. Snuggle is a semi-automated socialization support tool designed to make identifying and supporting good-faith newcomers faster and easier. Snuggle uses computational classification strategies to flag good-faith newcomers, displays summaries of newcomers' work and their interactions with other editors and enables users to categorize and contact good-faith newcomers in need of help.

Fully-automated robots

These tools perform actions on Wikipedia will little or no human intervention. See en:Category:All_Wikipedia_bots for a list of bot accounts on the English Wikipedia. For details on identifying bot users, see bot user.

Examples

Loading content	rambot -- largely considered to be the first Wikipedia bot -- was used to add and maintain U.S. county and city articles.
Mass messaging	EdwardsBot was a used to send local and global mass messages to Wikipedia editors. (note that MassMessage has rendered such bots redundant)
Style & refactoring	Helpful Pixie Bot (among other tasks) corrects ISBN numbers in citations.
Norm enforcement	Sinebot signs comments added to discussion pages that were not signed by the commenting editor.
Specialized tasks	ClueBot NG is the most prolific counter-vandalism robot on the English Wikipedia. ClueBot NG uses computation classification strategies to identify and revert egregious vandalism as well as send warning messages

Measuring human effort

Since automated editing tools minimize or negate the need for human effort and accelerate the rate of editing, they undermine the use of edit count/rate as a signal for human editor effort. For this reason, research of human behavior in Wikipedia tends to discard the edits of bot editors (e.g. and

Detection of automated edits and R:bot users

TODO