 | This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. This essay reflected how some people felt about bots on Wikipedia in ~2008. Since then, massive overhauls to the bot approval process, bot policy, BAG appointments, and bot dispute resolution have been made. While some people still consider bots annoying because of flooding and malfunctions, the sentiments and advice expressed in here no longer reflect the current state of Wikipedia. |
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Bots are annoying. Not only bots are annoying, but also scripts and certain forms of automated editing.
Currently (March 2008), Wikipedia reverts vandalism in about under a minute, so if you create and run an anti-vandalism bot, you aren't actually contributing any content to the project.
Wikipedia also presently has a massively increasing quantity of content (over 5.4 million articles), which is not being offset by an overall rise in quality.
So, if you are mass-generating directory entries, even if your work goes undisturbed by the community and isn't deleted under WP:DIRECTORY, you are paradoxically hurting Wikipedia's credibility by spamming mass amounts of content without any regard for the article's quality and without ever making any attempt to expand it beyond an article stub.