Hi! Gerard is right that Rambot is ancient history, but that's precisely why I think it is fascinating. Gerard, I would love to hear more about the upload of all the municipalities in China, but it sounds like nothing has been written up yet. Can you give any links to where any discussions are taking place? Is it primarily on en or zh wiki? Does wikidata have anything to do with it? To Iolanda, this question depends a bit on how you're approaching this topic. I'm curious if you are 1) more interested in the automation of knowledge production and are coming to municipalities/Rambot as a case of that, or 2) if you're more interested in the representation of municipalities (or something else) and are coming to bots/Rambot because they're an important aspect of that issue. I suspect #2, and I think there are more gaps in the Wikipedia bot literature when it comes to those kinds in general, as lot of us who write about bots approach the topic from the other side. If you're looking for studies about what happens when bots automate tasks in Wikipedia, I can give you a wave of cites, but they may not be as relevant. There are lots of papers about bots which throw out the example of Rambot for a few sentences without dwelling on the case too much -- I'm certainly guilty of this, so I won't vanity cite them. However, Niederer and van Dijck [1] spend a good amount of time discussing the Rambot case in detail in their great NMS article. Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution [2] also goes pretty in-depth into the history of Rambot, talking about came to be and what it did, along with some controversies it created. [1] http://dare.uva.nl/document/337567 [2] google books link -- http://is.gd/7jgfj7 Best, Stuart On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com > Hoi, > More interesting than what was written about the upload of US > municipalities on en.wp is the upload of all the municipalities of China. > It has been uploaded including the structure to higher level > administrations. > > Yes, there is the rambot stuff, but it is ancient history by now. > Thanks, > GerardM > > > On 16 March 2014 10:13, Iolanda Pensa <iolanda(a)pensa.it> >> I was wondering if you know about papers and research related to the >> upload of municipalities on Wikipedia. >> I refer to rambot [1] but also to similar experiences on other linguistic >> editions of Wikipedia and municipalities of other countries >> thank you very much >> regards, iolanda/iopensa >> >> [1] >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:History_of_Wikipedia_bots#.22rambot… >> _______________________________________________ >> Wiki-research-l mailing list >> Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l >> > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l > >

Hoi, The lack of documentation about the Chinese villages, district et al, the lack of a discussion is actually what should make it of interest. All this data is available in Wikidata and you can search for 郭坑镇 in several Wikipedias and get a positive result. One of the options is to see this information in Reasonator [1]. This makes it almost as effective as what rambot did. Rambot was mostly effective for en.wp and for getting a discussion about this in the Wikipedia context going. When it comes to literature, it is nice to read it all and once you have, you have not observed what is happening. Wikidata is happening. Wikipedia is largely stable, coasting. Thanks, GerardM NB this is the Wiki-research mailing list .. not en.wp [1] http://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q14422505 On 16 March 2014 19:14, R.Stuart Geiger <sgeiger(a)gmail.com> wrote:

thanks for the very valuable information. there is a History of Wikipedia bots [1]; I added your hints in the session ""rambot" and other small-town bots”. please do not hesitate to remove, improve, correct. yes, I am personally interested in geographic information (and its balance/unbalance) and my interest in Rambot is related to the legend (or the fact) that the upload of municipalities has triggered editing and similar bots and experiences on Wikipedia not only in English. WikiData is definitely a game changer but I share the fascination for ancient history and I think it might have some lessons to teach us. thanks! iolanda/iopensa [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:History_of_Wikipedia_bots Il giorno 17/mar/2014, alle ore 10:44, Edward Summers <ehs(a)pobox.com> ha scritto:

Hello Iolanda, About the bot articles I wrote some years ago in my German handbook of the International Wikipedia. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Ziko/Handbuch-Allgemeines See also my contribution to Language Problems and Language Planning in 2009. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/lplp/2009/00000033/00000003/art00… On the WikiCon in Karlsruhe, 2013, we talked about the bot articles because of the recent mass creation on nl.WP. Initiator of the discussion was Benutzer:Holder. Kind regards Ziko 2014-03-17 16:56 GMT+01:00 Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:

Il giorno 17/mar/2014, alle ore 16:56, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org> ha scritto: hi Dario i have the impression is much more efficient to produce topic pages on WikiPapers. there is already a list of research areas [1] maybe meta can simply provide links to those research areas. do you see specific benefits in creating new pages on meta? iolanda [1] http://wikipapers.referata.com/wiki/List_of_research_areas