Could an army of bots solve all Wikipedia's problems?

Two related news items got me thinking about the future of Wikipedia, the biggest and best encyclopedia created by man, and based on collective editing in an open environment.

The first was about the development of the Cebuano version of Wikipedia, a Filipino language spoken by some 16.5 million people, which is now the second-largest edition of the encyclopedia worldwide after English, thanks to the use of a bot that performs automated translations. The consensus among Wikipedia’s editors is that it is better to translate in this way than not having anything on a topic. In fact, in the case of the bot that translates Wikipedia into Cebuano — which has contributed no less than 24 million of its 29.5 million contributions — it turns out that the quality of the automated translation is barely distinguishable from that carried out by a person, and of course, much quicker. Automated translation is a task that machine learning is helping to improve significantly, and in the case of some language pairs, can be done almost perfectly.

At the same time, bots are increasingly being used in Wikipedia to update texts. It is estimated that there are approximately 1,601 in all editions of Wikipedia, which are routinely used to perform repetitive tasks, to detect and prevent vandalism by rolling back a page, etc. But in some cases, bots are now being used to write content, a function that is carried out with increasing dependability and perfection, to the point of making their writing indiscernible from that carried out by a human editor.

Wikipedia is one of the most important collective works in the history of mankind. Could we be looking at a future where most of the maintenance or editing of Wikipedia is done by bots? What might be the implications for the nature and management of the project? How many and what kind of projects could evolve in the same way?

(En espa?ol, aquí)

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