Wikipedia:History of Wikipedia bots

See also Wikipedia: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.

Eastman Bible Dictionary In late 2001 a contributor imported quite a few entries from the 100 year-old Eastman Bible Dictionary. It 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 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.