Wikipedia:Bot-created articles
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Articles can sometimes be created by bots, but they need consensus to ensure the articles are acceptable |
Sometimes articles are created by a bot. The issue has been controversial, this page discusses some arguments for and against it and the current guidance. The current guideline for creating articles with a bot is set out at WP:MASSCREATION meaning consensus is required to ensure that they comply with Wikipedia's guidelines.
Proponents of bot generated articles point to the fact that a bot can create large numbers of articles that are correctly formatted without constant oversight and are less likely to make errors providing they are programmed correctly. Opponents of bot generated articles point to articles being bland and uninformative and bots that do make errors or create articles of dubious notability.
What could be created by bot edit
There is a limited number of things that are suitable for automatic creation. In all cases:
- All articles should meet notability requirements
- All articles must be reliably sourced (this generally means having one or more high-quality databases covering the topic at hand)
- The articles, as created by the bot, must be in a generally acceptable state to not overly burden the community with tedious maintenance
- The bot complies with all the terms of WP:MASSCREATION, including having a successful WP:BRFA, following widely advertised discussions
For example, a bot could create articles on comets, based on the COBS database. Provided
- That the articles created complied with WP:NASTRO
- That COBS was considered an acceptable source
- That the resulting articles were considered good additions to Wikipedia
- That the bot creation of those articles was extensively advertised, discussed, trialled, and ultimately approved.
However, whether or not such a bot should create such articles is up to the community.
What should usually not be created by bots edit
- Any topic that might not meet the notability guidelines.
- Any topic where the source database would be considered unreliable.
- Any topic where the article cannot be adequately summarized by an automated process.
Notable examples of bots edit
- In 2002, Rambot created articles on 33,000 U.S. settlements from census data at rate of thousands per day. However, an error occurred in about 2,000 of those article, which caused significant headaches.
- Prior to 2012, ClueBot II, created articles on ~20,000 asteroids from NASA but most were eventually found to be non-notable and redirected. This led to the creation of WP:NASTRO and WP:AST2000 in particular.
- Lsjbot created several articles on species on the Swedish, Cebuano, Dutch, and Waray Wikipedias, to the point where the majority of articles on some of those have been bot-created.