I stopped actively editing Wikipedia more or less one year ago. Naturally, I haven’t stopped editing completely, as I still read Wikipedia nearly every day in the pursuit of my own edification. But I no longer seek out thankless administrative tasks to perform, nor do I browse articles solely to find a way to contribute some writing. In that way I’m much more like the casual reader who occasionally fixes a typo, though the casual reader also doesn’t have the ability to delete articles, block users, and protect pages (ah, the privileges of being an administrator). But I don’t much use those abilities anymore, so it matters little.

In addition to doing lots of editing and administrative tasks (page may take awhile to load), I also spent a good amount of time hacking on programs for Wikipedia. Some, such as the userbox generator (don’t even ask), were purposefully silly. Others, such as my work on the PyWikipediaBot free software project, were more useful. In addition to my work on that bot framework, I wrote quite a few bots, which are programs for making automated edits. By the time I (mostly) retired from Wikipedia, I had put many hours into those bots, and I couldn’t bear to just shut them down. So I left them running. They’ve been running now for over a year, unattended for the most part, and have been remarkably error-free all things considered. I have variously forgotten about them for months at a time, and only remembered them when my network connection chugs for an extended period of time (long “Categories for deletion” backlog) or when my server’s CPU utilization pegs (bot process gets stuck in an endless loop). So yes, there is a zombie bot editing Wikipedia, and it even has administrative rights that it uses quite frequently!

All of these bot programs that I wrote run under one Wikipedia user account, Cydebot. That account was the first account on any Wikipedia project to break one million edits. The total currently stands somewhere at a million and a quarter (proof), though it has been out-edited by one other bot account by now. But just think about the enormity of that number. At one point Cydebot had a single digit percentage of all edits to the English Wikipedia. You can’t say that’s not impressive, especially considering how ridiculously massive Wikipedia is. Yet being a bot operator was largely unsung work. The only time I really got noticed for all the effort I was putting into it (and never mind the network resources involved, especially when I was running AntiVandalBot, which downloaded and analyzed the text of every single edit to Wikipedia in real time) was when yet another person thought they were the first to realize that Cydebot was using administrative tools and deemed it necessary to yell at me about it. Wikipedia has this cargo cult rule that “admin bots aren’t allowed” — even though people have been running them for years. I’ll grant that it’s schizophrenic.

So after continuing to run Cydebot for this long, I’m not going to stop now. I haven’t put any effort into Cydebot for over a year besides occasionally updating the pyWikipediaBot framework from SVN, killing pegged bot processes, and rarely modifying the batch files for my bots when someone points out that the associated pages on Wikipedia have changed. I don’t have the time (nor the desire) to put any further serious development work into Cydebot, so at some point things will finally break and Cydebot will no longer be able to do any work. But it’s already gone for over a year performing all sorts of thankless tasks on Wikipedia that no human wants to be bothered with; why not let it continue going and see how much longer my favorite zombie bot can continue at it for?

If you want to track the continuing edits of a zombie bot on Wikipedia, you can do so here. So the next time you are idly reading Wikipedia, remember that, not only are there bots behind the scenes that are making millions of automated edits, but some of them are zombies that have been running largely unattended for months, if not years. Wikipedia is built, in no small part, upon zombie labor.