Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots

Below is a history of bots that have contributed substantial amounts of encyclopediaic material in an automated fashion.

See also types of bots.

Fed. Stand. 1037C
Several hundred articles from Federal Standard 1037C were imported. The articles were pre-filtered to remove short entries and entries that were from non-public-domain sources. They were then auto-wikified. Only articles with titles that did not already exist on Wikipedia were imported.

Easton's Bible Dictionary
In October 2001 and again in August 2002, contributors imported quite a few entries from the 100 year-old Easton's Bible Dictionary. These imports caused some discussion because entries were biased, written in a pedantic Victorian prose, and some were incorrectly wikified (self links or multiple links). The issues were worked out with the bot's creator on the Wikipedia mailing list (see and subsequent postings) and various talk pages, and new contributor guidelines were also revised accordingly.

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
The same bot was used to load the first major wave of selected articles from Project Gutenberg's copy of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica volume 1, but it didn't create such a stir that time.

BC Decades
Because the decade entries are highly structured, a bot was used to load templates for many of them.

"rambot" and other small-town bots
(October 18, 2002 - October 26, 2002): The so-called rambot created approximately 30,000 U.S. city articles. One error in the data set being used caused a corruption of around 2,000 new articles. Another incident caused the Recent Changes to become more difficult to use for a time and prompted much discussion and the creation of a Wikipedia bot policy.

Concurrently with the Rambot, some 800 stub articles on Dutch (500) and Swedish (300) municipalities were created by a bot owned by Jeronimo. These appear under IP 131.155.230.XXX.

The anomebot was written in 2003 for the purpose of uploading approximately 5000 map images to illustrate the U.S. counties articles.

Robbot
Rob Hooft's bot was developed on the Dutch Wikipedia in Summer 2003. Although other applications were developed first (year templates), its main use became doing interlanguage links, first at the Dutch Wikipedia, later also in other languages (Danish from August, French from November and many other languages as well). In early October, it was first used on the English Wikipedia, using username Robbot and helping in resolving links to disambiguation pages.

pt:Wikipedia:História dos Bots