Lsjbot

Lsjbot is an automated Wikipedia article-creating program, or internet bot, developed by Sverker Johansson for the Swedish Wikipedia. The bot primarily focuses on articles about living organisms.

History

Sverker Johansson, developer of Lsjbot

The program is responsible for 2.7 million articles as of July 2014, two thirds of which appear in the Cebuano Wikipedia (the native language of Johansson's wife Smiley); the other third appear in the Swedish Wikipedia. The bot can produce up to 10,000 articles per day. Its operation has generated some criticism, from those who suggest the stub articles lack meaningful content and a human touch.^[1] Worldwide attention was brought to the bot in July 2014 when a profile of it appeared in The Wall Street Journal.^[2] The Sydney Morning Herald compared the bot to Phil Parker, allegedly the most published author in human history, who has published over 85,000 books, each of which is completed in less than an hour using computers.^[3] Others compared the development to the recent announcement by the Associated Press that it planned to use bots to write articles.^[4] Johansson countered attacks on his methods by noting that if the bot does not write articles, "otherwise they're mainly written by young, white, male nerds and reflect male interests."^[5]

On June 15, 2013, the Swedish Wikipedia hit one million articles, the eighth language Wikipedia to reach that goal. The millionth article was created by Lsjbot – which at that point had created 454,000 articles, almost half the entire article count of the Swedish Wikipedia.^[6] Lsjbot was also responsible for helping the Swedish Wikipedia become the second edition of Wikipedia to reach 2 million articles, which subsequently became the second largest edition of Wikipedia behind only its English counterpart.

Scope

According to its description page on the Swedish Wikipedia,^[7] the program is devoted primarily to articles on all the world's living creatures. Completed projects include creating articles for all the world's recognised bird and fungal species. A future goal in the long term is to create articles for the million species that lack articles and which it is not realistic to expect that any human will create. The creation is now underway, and is expected to be completed during 2014. All recognised animal species are done, and the plants are in progress.

Another bot project is to improve the Swedish Wikipedia's articles on the Philippines. The bot is able to create stub articles on Filipino towns using information from the Tagalog Wikipedia.

Johansson says he avoids having the bot use databases on topics where there is likely to be bias, such as present-day companies.^[2]

Lsjbot is also active in the Cebuano and Waray-Waray Wikipedias, and has created the majority of the Wikipedia articles available in these languages. Since then, the Cebuano edition of Wikipedia overtook the German edition to become the third-largest edition of Wikipedia.

In autumn 2016, Lsjbot is concentrating on geography articles on Iceland for Swedish Wikipedia.

References

External links

• Source code of Lsjbot