Lsjbot+Bot Acadeny - Wikimedia-l

16 Sep 2014

Lsjbot has now completed its run of generating articles for all species, 
with 310 000 on plants, making the total number generated above 1 300 
000 (source used: Catalogue of Life).  With Naskobot, having earlier 
generated some 85 000 articles on Swedish lakes and French communes 
etc., the total botgenerated articles on svwp are now 1,4 M

The botgenerating efforts have received overwhelmingly positive feedback 
from the svwp  community, with comments like:
*for editors it has become more stimulating writing new articles on 
related subjects. When we write of a place in Sweden we know that all 
mentioned lakes have articles, making the article better and more 
correct  (no lakes mentioned are spelled incorrectly any longer). Also 
photo safaris are more fun when all lakes, even very small ones, are 
relevant to take photos of and include in articles
*experts are more attracted participating  when they are guided to the 
stub from Google. Also we get feedback it is much easier to enter 
information on Wikipedia when the base skeleton is there already 
(taxobox, category, links in wikidata, picture, base sourceref). We see 
an increasing number of University classes in biology given he 
assignment to write (expand) articles on (not so known) species

We are also gladdened by the hard numbers. Reader accesses show a 
healthy increase even from our already high number. And a trend of a 
slight decrease of editors has now turned into an increase.  We can not 
say for certain why and it could be temporary but we believe the 
botgenerated articles has a part of this positive development.

Encouraged by this, we will now start what we call Bot Academy. A dozen 
of our experienced editors will, with the support from WMSE, learn more 
of running bots. First by sessions on basics, common knowledge stuff, in 
order for us to be able to use bot as a complement in our editing 
efforts. And after that we will have sessions for advanced use, taking 
in the learning from Lsjbot and Naskobot, in order to  see if also we 
can find areas where we from excellent sources can generate articles.

For 2015 we are contemplating the following botgenerating efforts
*lsj (sverker) will support other versions interested to run Lsjbot. He 
is now in discussion with Farsi and Arabic wp, where there are some 
interesting technical challenges related to the different alphabeticscript
*we will scan best practices of bot generation on other versions (it, 
nl, id, vt, serbocroatia, farsi, ru etc) (it seems we have nothing to 
learn of this from the biggest seven...)
*lsj will look into using the database used by Swedish libraries, with 
info of authors and books. Would it be feasible to generate articles on 
authors?
*for myself I am continuing my initiative with the aim of fully 
integrate 100000 article of Swedish geographic entities with wikidata, 
in order to  by the end to generate, if wanted,  up to 100000 articles 
related to Swedish geography on 200 other versions. There is a lot 
needed of quality improvement of the articles first and also the 
Wikidata must get better before this can work, but perhaps it will be 
possible to get this going for a subset of articles in 2015 even if the 
full set will take some years longer before being ready to deploy

Anders
for examples, press "slumpartikel" (random artiicle) on 
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Huvudsida