[Wikimedia-l] Lsjbot has now started to generate 1-1, 5 M articles of species on sv:wp

[Anders Wennersten]

Inspired by the botgenerated articles of species made on nl:wp in late
2010 a colleague of mine, User:Lsj, started a similar project on sv:wp
early 2012. By October 2012 his bot had generated some 65 000 articles,
with essentially complete coverage of all fungi and birds.

He has since then extended the scope to include all living species, both
animals and plants, which means another 1-1,5 million articles. Running
at full permissible bot speed, the bot generates around 10,000 articles
per day, but at a more realistic speed, the full project will take the
rest of 2013 to complete.

The botcode has been written in a language-independent way, so that it
can be ported to other language versions with only a modest effort. All
language-specific text strings are in external files, so the code itself
does not need changing between language versions. Beyond Swedish, the
code has been tested on Cebuano wikipedia as well; full production on
cebwp is ready to go, just awaiting community blessing there.

The source of the core of the data is taken from  Catalogue of Life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_of_Life  but the bot also checks
with Commons, other languages(iwlinks) and other appropriate databases,
such as the IUCN Redlist of endangered species.

The botcode is written in C# and uses the DotNetWikiBot framework.

Example articles:
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichenopora_verrucaria
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylactolaemata
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundkrassing  
http://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipunculidae
http://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaster_endeca

The full set of created articles (includes some other stuff as well,
besides organisms):
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:Robotskapade_artiklar  
http://ceb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategoriya:Paghimo_ni_bot  

My colleague is much too busy now to discuss himself just now, but I
think it could be an inspiration for us all.

Besides Lsj himself there are about 10 users supporting him, with
checking that the bot generate correct data etc, it has also been
discussed extensively on our village pump etc Wikidata is as yet not
used

The page where the project is discussed is just now (in Swedish of
course..)

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndardiskussion:Lsjbot/Projekt_alla_arter



Anders