Lsjbot is an automated Wikipedia article-creating program, or Internet bot, developed by Sverker Johansson for the Swedish Wikipedia. The bot primarily focuses on articles about living organisms and geographical entities. According to its description page on the Swedish Wikipedia, Lsjbot was active in the Swedish Wikipedia and in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias, and has created most Wikipedia articles in those languages.
History
The program is responsible for 2.7 million articles as of 2014, two thirds of which appear in the Cebuano language Wikipedia ; the other third appear in the Swedish Wikipedia. The bot can produce up to 10,000 articles per day. On June 15, 2013, the Swedish Wikipedia hit one million articles, the eighth language on Wikipedia to reach that goal. The millionth article was created by Lsjbot – which at that point had created 454,000 articles, almost half of the entire article count of the Swedish Wikipedia. Lsjbot was also responsible for helping the Swedish Wikipedia become the second edition of Wikipedia to reach 2 million articles, which subsequently became the second largest edition of Wikipedia behind only its English counterpart. In February 2020, Vice reported that Lsjbot was responsible for over 24 million of 29.5 million edits at , now the world's second largest Wikipedia, with bots comprising all but five of the site's top 35 editors and no human editors in the top 10. However, Lsjbot is no longer creating new articles at the Cebuano, Swedish, and Waray-Waray Wikipedias. Sverker Johansson explained that "opinions shifted" within the Swedish Wikipedia community and Waray-Waray editors were unable to form a consensus about the automatic creation of articles.
Its operation has generated some criticism, from those who suggest the stub articles lack meaningful content and a human touch. The SydneyMorning Herald compared the bot to Phil Parker, allegedly the most published author in human history, who has published over 85,000 books, each of which is completed in less than an hour using computers. Popular Science compared the bot to the announcement in July 2014 by the Associated Press that it planned to use bots to write articles. Johansson countered attacks on his methods by noting that if the bot does not write articles, "otherwise they're mainly written by young, white, male nerds and reflect male interests."
