User:T-rex/essays/Bot-O-Pedia

Wikipedia has grown greatly in size, and far past the point where there are enough editors to manage the project. Meanwhile it has become a favorite search result from Google, and other search engines as such becoming a favorite target of vandals and spammers. The encyclopedia would have already been overrun and written off as a failed project if not for the ability to run bots to monitor, maintain, and grow wikipedia.

Wikipedians only have two advantages over the vandals, and these are the admin flag and the bot flag. The advantages of the admin flag are obvious and allow protection and blocks as tools to prevent problems. However the bot flag is equally important, as it allows automated systems to make high speed edits to protect wikipedia as it is. At this point the vast majority of non-vandal edits are made by bots of some type, either by sorting, auto-reverting vandalism, or by even creating articles.

While human editors are still needed to grow and update articles, as the encyclopedia continues to grow and the attacks from outside become stronger, we are approaching a future where well over 90% of all edits will be done by robots.

Before we had bots enforcing the image use policies, there was essentially nothing being done in that area, and very little was ever cleaned up as it was far too much work. However, now that all of the images are categorized by bots, there are actual procedures being followed, that previously had not been.

Also the semi-bots such as AWB and Huggle, are also giving editors much more information, allowing them to more efficiently, and effectively edit wikipedia. Once again the most effective way to enforce any changes in the manual of style is to work the changes into AWB's defaults.