 A typical article generated by Lsjbot | |
| Developer(s) | Sverker Johansson |
|---|---|
| Type | Internet bot |
| Website | Lsjbot on Swedish Misplaced Pages |
Lsjbot is an automated Misplaced Pages article-creating program, or Misplaced Pages bot, developed by Sverker Johansson for the Swedish Misplaced Pages. The bot primarily focuses on articles about living organisms and geographical entities (such as rivers, dams, and mountains).
According to its description page on the Swedish Misplaced Pages, Lsjbot was active in the Swedish and Waray Wikipedias and is currently active in the Cebuano Misplaced Pages, and has created most Misplaced Pages articles in those languages (between 80% and 99% of the total).
During 2020, Lsjbot was only performing maintenance on the Cebuano Misplaced Pages, with no major article creation projects underway.
History
The program was responsible for 2.7 million articles as of 2014 (at a rate of 10,000 articles per day), and 9.5 million articles as of January 2019 (at a rate of 4,000 per day), two-thirds of which appear in the Cebuano language Misplaced Pages (the native language of Johansson's wife); the other third appear in the Swedish Misplaced Pages.
On 15 June 2013, the Swedish Misplaced Pages hit one million articles, the eighth language on Misplaced Pages 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 Misplaced Pages. Lsjbot was also responsible for helping the Swedish Misplaced Pages become the second edition of Misplaced Pages to reach 2 million articles, which as of 2024 is the fifth largest edition of Misplaced Pages behind English, Cebuano, German and French.
In February 2020, Vice reported that Lsjbot was responsible for over 24 million of 29.5 million edits at Cebuano Misplaced Pages, now the world's second largest Misplaced Pages, 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 Misplaced Pages community and Waray-Waray editors were unable to form a consensus about the automatic creation of articles.
On the Swedish Misplaced Pages, 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. 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 Misplaced Pages 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. 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, each of which is completed in less than an hour using computers. Popular Science compared the bot to the announcement in July 2014 by the Associated Press that it planned to use bots to write articles. Johansson countered attacks on his methods by appealing to problems of gender bias on Misplaced Pages, noting that if the bot does not write articles, "otherwise they're mainly written by young, white, male nerds and reflect male interests."
References
- The bot’s user page on the Swedish Misplaced Pages, translated to English using Google Translate.
- ^ "Misplaced Pages Statistics, Bot article creations only". 31 January 2019.
- ^ Wilson, Kyle (11 February 2020). "The World's Second Largest Misplaced Pages Is Written Almost Entirely by One Bot". Vice.com. Retrieved 8 February 2021.
- ^ Main, Douglas (14 July 2014). "This Bot Has Written More Misplaced Pages Articles Than Anybody". Popular Science. Retrieved 13 December 2020.
- Gulbrandsson, Lennart (17 June 2013). "Swedish Misplaced Pages 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". 22 October 2021.
- Jervell, Ellen Emmerentze (13 July 2014). "For This Author, 10,000 Misplaced Pages Articles Is a Good Day's Work". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 24 February 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
- Cohen, Noam (14 April 2008). "He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 23 March 2023. Retrieved 3 August 2010.
- Ein Mann sieht Code Archived 11 February 2013 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 Misplaced Pages". 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
