The Nonhuman Writers of Wikipedia

Chapter 5 of The New Media Writer discusses search engine robots and other web bots as potential audiences of your online writing. Wikipedia is just one of those sites to which you might contribute that uses bots to read its content. 

However, those bots also help write articles, or more specifically, edit them. 

Consider this recent article from MIT Technology Review that discusses work by Thomas Steiner that helps to pinpoint how much "writing" bots perform on Wikipedia (and Wikidata, a site that works in tandem with Wikipedia). Specifically: 

...at the time of writing, across all language version of Wikipedia there are 10,407 edits being carried out by Bots and 11,148 by human Wikipedians. So that’s a 49/51 split between bots and humans.

But a closer look at the data reveals some interesting variations. For example, only 5 percent of the edits to the English language version of Wikipedia are being done by bots right now. By contrast, 94 percent of the edits to the Vietnamese version are by bots.

Check out the full article. 

The Shadowy World of Wikipedia's Editing Bots