Lsjbot

Lsjbot
	A typical article generated by Lsjbot
Developer(s)	Sverker Johansson
Type	Internet bot
Website	Lsjbot on Swedish Wikipedia

Last updated January 23, 2024

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).

History

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]

Related Research Articles

Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.

The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.

The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.

The Dutch Wikipedia is the Dutch-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It was founded on 19 June 2001.

The Italian Wikipedia is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001, and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of January 21, 2024, it has 1,844,394 articles and more than 2,473,024 registered accounts. It is the 9th-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles.

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The Arabic Wikipedia is the Modern Standard Arabic version of Wikipedia. It started on 9 July 2003. As of January 2024, it has 1,226,284 articles, 2,535,896 registered users and 53,632 files and it is the 17th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count, and ranks 8th in terms of depth among Wikipedias. It was the first Wikipedia in a Semitic language to exceed 100,000 articles on 25 May 2009, and also the first Semitic language to exceed 1 million articles, on 17 November 2019.

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The Vietnamese Wikipedia is the Vietnamese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, publicly editable, online encyclopedia supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. Like the rest of Wikipedia, its content is created and accessed using the MediaWiki wiki software.

The Latvian Wikipedia is the Latvian-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was created on 6 June 2003. With more than 125,000 articles, it is currently the 68th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles and the second-largest Wikipedia in a Baltic language after the Lithuanian Wikipedia.

The Tagalog Wikipedia is the Tagalog language edition of Wikipedia, which was launched on December 1, 2003. It has 46,291 articles and is the 102nd largest Wikipedia according to the number of articles as of January 21, 2024.

The Swedish Wikipedia is the Swedish-language edition of Wikipedia and was started on the 23 of May 2001. It is currently the fifth largest Wikipedia by article count with its 2,574,897 current articles, it has a Wikipedia article depth of 17.45. A majority were generated by Lsjbot, a bot, or software application. The administrators on the Swedish Wikipedia are elected for a fixed-term period of one year and have to be re-elected after that time.

The Uzbek Wikipedia is the Uzbek-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was founded in December 2003. Articles in the Uzbek-language edition are written in the Latin script. In August 2012, a Latin-to-Cyrillic converter was added to allow users to view Uzbek Wikipedia's pages in both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

The Waray Wikipedia is the Waray language edition of Wikipedia. It is hosted on servers run by the Wikimedia Foundation since September 25, 2005. As of January 21, 2024, this edition has 1,266,377 articles and is the 16th largest Wikipedia edition. The Waray Wikipedia has very few active users (69), and instead owes its large size to automatically generated articles created by bots, most of them by Sverker Johansson's Lsjbot.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:

The Volapük Wikipedia is the Volapük-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was created in February 2003, but launched in January 2004. As of 22 January 2024, it is the 108th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, with about 36,000 articles, and the second-largest Wikipedia in a constructed language after the Esperanto Wikipedia.

Sverker Johansson is a Swedish physicist, linguist, textbook author and university professor. He created Lsjbot, a Wikipedia bot.

Waray is an Austronesian language and the fifth-most-spoken native regional language of the Philippines, native to Eastern Visayas. It is the native language of the Waray people and second language of the Abaknon people of Capul, Northern Samar, and some Cebuano-speaking peoples of western and southern parts of Leyte island. It is the third most spoken language among the Bisayan languages, only behind Cebuano and Hiligaynon.

The Cebuano Wikipedia is the Cebuano-language edition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Despite being the second-largest Wikipedia in numbers of articles, it has a small community of only 194 active users; nearly all of the 6,121,901 articles were initially created through automatic programs, most notably Sverker Johansson's Lsjbot.

Wikipedia bots are Internet bots that perform simple, repetitive tasks on Wikipedia. One prominent example of an internet bot used in Wikipedia is Lsjbot, which generated millions of short articles across various language editions of Wikipedia.

References

↑ The bot’s user page on the Swedish Wikipedia, translated to English using Google Translate.
1 2 "Wikipedia Statistics, Bot article creations only". January 31, 2019.
1 2 Wilson, Kyle (February 11, 2020). "The World's Second Largest Wikipedia Is Written Almost Entirely by One Bot". Vice.com. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
1 2 Main, Douglas (14 July 2014). "This Bot Has Written More Wikipedia Articles Than Anybody". Popular Science. Retrieved 13 December 2020.
↑ 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.
↑ "List of Wikipedias". October 22, 2021.
↑ 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.
↑ 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.
↑ Ein Mann sieht Code Archived 2013-02-11 at archive.today , Financial Times Deutschland, 9 May 2008. (in German).
↑ 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.
↑ "Swedish Wiki vet sets new content record". The Local . 18 July 2014. Archived from the original on 24 February 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.

External links

Source code of Lsjbot
Official website

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] The bot’s user page on the Swedish Wikipedia, translated to English using Google Translate.

[botact-2] 1 2 "Wikipedia Statistics, Bot article creations only". January 31, 2019.

[Wilson-3] 1 2 Wilson, Kyle (February 11, 2020). "The World's Second Largest Wikipedia Is Written Almost Entirely by One Bot". Vice.com. Retrieved February 8, 2021.

[Main-4] 1 2 Main, Douglas (14 July 2014). "This Bot Has Written More Wikipedia Articles Than Anybody". Popular Science. Retrieved 13 December 2020.

[one-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).

[parker-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.

[local-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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