Bots vs. Wikipedians, Anons vs. Logged-Ins (Redux): a Global Study of Edit Activity on Wikipedia and Wikidata

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Bots vs. Wikipedians, Anons vs. Logged-Ins (Redux): a Global Study of Edit Activity on Wikipedia and Wikidata - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2014, written by Thomas Steiner.

Overview

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, authors 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 knowledge, this is the first time such an analysis was done for Wikidata and for really all Wikipedias---large and small. According to results, all Wikipedias and Wikidata together are edited by about 50% bots and by about 23% anonymous users. Wikidata alone accounts for about 48% of the totally observed edits. If authors do not consider Wikidata, i.e., if authors only look at all Wikipedias, about 15% of all edits are made by bots and 26% of all edits are made by anonymous users. Overall, authors found a stabilizing number of 274 active bots during observation period. Authors 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.