On 29 July 2010 22:21, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Fair points. It got me thinking, though. What proportion of Wikipedia editing is automated? Or rather, what proportion of edits would be considered "human" as opposed to "something else" (done on autopilot or using a bot)? This is a different question to what proportion are automated imports - that sort of question is something I've been meaning to ask at Commons, and also trying to find out what proportion of pictures get used in a recognisable way (and what is done with pictures that are unlikely to ever be used).
Slightly under 10% of all edits on enwiki were by bots - that's bot-flagged accounts, not the various automatically-assisted tools.
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotsPngEditHistoryTable.htm
The proportion has crept up a bit over time, but eyeballing the chart it seems to have been stable around 9% for the last year or two. There's a recent spike indicated there - I don't know if that's an anomaly or not.
Across all languages, it's 20% historically, closer to 25% as a proportion of current edits. Interestingly, it's clear that, roughly speaking, the smaller the project the higher the proportion of bot edits:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proportion_of_bot_edits_on_Wikipedia_...