Semiautomated editing in Wikipedia: The AutoWikiBrowser case

Semiautomated editing in Wikipedia: TheAutoWikiBrowser case

Marios MagioladitisSysop in en.wiki,

editor in ar.wiki and de.wiki,autoreviewer and rollbacker in pt.wiki

autoeditor in ru.wiki,autopatrolled in fr.wiki

autoconfirmed in es.wiki, tr.wiki and zh.wiki

Carl von Ossietzky Universitat Oldenburg, Institut fur Mathematik

15. September 2011Doktorandenkolloquium

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 1 / 18

Wikipedia

Wikipedia founded 15th of January 2001282 languages / 365 million visitors

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 2 / 18

Wikipedia

ALL: 19 M / EN: 3,7 M / DE: 1,2 M

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 3 / 18

A few people do a lot of work

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 4 / 18

Active Wikipedians

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 5 / 18

Active Wikipedians and bots

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 6 / 18

The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit

We still need some rules both on context and layoutWikipedia:Wie gute Artikel aussehenAlt+TAB

Idea: Use (semi-)automated tools to uniformise the style

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 7 / 18

The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit

We still need some rules both on context and layoutWikipedia:Wie gute Artikel aussehenAlt+TABIdea: Use (semi-)automated tools to uniformise the style

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 7 / 18

AutoWikiBrowser (AWB)

Alt+TAB

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 8 / 18

AutoWikiBrowser in Wikipedia

Page edits since Wikipedia was set up: 485,598,110(Special:Statistics)Page edits since Wikipedia was set up with AWB: 120,782,035(toolserver.org/AWB)Edits with AWB / Total edits: 24,87%

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 9 / 18

AutoWikiBrowser: Features

WP:GENFIXES

Alt+TAB

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 10 / 18

Regular expressions

Wikipedia:Regular expressions

Alt+TAB

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 11 / 18

Code analysis

> 2 million lines of C#633K comments1.6M is C#Many pluginsCode available at SourceForge.net

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 12 / 18

Developers

BluemooseLigulemMagioladitisRjwilmsiMaxSemReedy

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 13 / 18

AutoWikiBrowser: Pros, cons and future plans

Pros and cons

It works for all wikiprojects and wikiasIt’s open sourceIt works only for Windows

Future plans

Mono and wine (Alt+TAB)PyAutoWikiBrowserWebapp?Firefox plugin?

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 14 / 18

A large example of use: Tagging BLPs

Wikipedia:Artikel uber lebende Personen (Alt+TAB)

900k+ biographies in en.wiki60k+ biographies with unknown status in 2009Tenths of new entries keep coming daily

Use prexisting categoriesAlways look at the bright side of deathCreate categories by using the textEliminate Dab pages, redirects, etc.Extra problems occured by bands etc.WP:DUCK

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 15 / 18

A large example of use: Tagging BLPs

Mar 09 Jun 09 Jul 09 Dec 09 Mar 10 Jun 10 Nov 10 Feb 11

date

num

ber

of a

rtic

les

010

000

3000

050

000

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 16 / 18

Vielen Dank!Eυχαριστω!

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 17 / 18

Tschussi!

M. Magioladitis (Uni Oldenburg) AWB 15. September 2011 18 / 18