One of the advantages of a wiki is being able to watch Recent Changes. It’s a nice way to see what is happening, either to watch for vandalism, to help collaborate on articles, or to see who is active.
The problem is that Wikipedia’s recent changes list is that it’s crazy busy. There’s no way for one person to watch it. Wikipedia has a project devoted to tracking vandalism through Recent Changes, and there are even software tools written for this.
Some members in WikiProject Oregon watch for changes on Oregon-related pages. I use a large watchlist, but a more authoritative way to do it is to watch all 9135 articles in the project through the RecentChangesLinked function. It’s even on this blog- look at the upper right part of the page.
This list is maintained by keeping a list of every article in the project. WikiProject Oregon member EncMstr has maintained this list by hand (and using a hand-run vim script). I realized this would be a great use of the MediaWiki API.
A long story later, but the code is done, released under the Berkley license and available on GitHub. It runs on my personal server daily; EncMstr used to run it every few months.
Seeing the recent changes list more frequently allows us to watch the newest articles- another bot usually finds 1-5 new articles per day that are related to Oregon, and these new articles can result in a lot of collaboration between us.
So, to echo a fellow Oregonian reporter, “I, for one, welcome our robot overlords!”
-tedder
WikiProject Oregon 
February 2, 2010 at 9:35 pm
It’s about time our robot overlords got some acknowledgment!
Seriously — many who aren’t deeply involved with Wikipedia marvel at the interaction between human and automated processes. Thanks for writing a post that touches on how automated processes (bots) can perform important functions that make life easier for the humans — and let the humans focus on doing what they do best!
What other interesting bots are there? I recently looked into the COIBot — one that identifies possible conflicts of interest, apparently just by comparing user names to the URL’s of articles they work on. (And maybe other criteria, I’m not sure.) Here are some of the accounts it found, giving editors some good data to investigate.
What else?
February 2, 2010 at 11:01 pm
There are a ton of bots. COIBot is very interesting. Even the bots that follow along to sign posts or auto-remove vandalism are brilliant. But there are a ton of other mundane bots: “this article is an orphan”, “this article has ambiguous links”, “here’s your latest newsletter”, etc.
Perhaps I need to go back into navelgazing mode and wax a little about wiki. The model is very interesting because it both allows and requires bots to keep things running smoothly. But that’s a lot easier than monolithic applications that require very deep knowledge of a system to get it right.
February 5, 2010 at 4:57 pm
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