It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.
This page in a nutshell: Articles can sometimes be created by bots, but they need consensus to ensure the articles are acceptable
Sometimes articles are created by a bot. The issue has been controversial, this page discusses some arguments for and against it and the current guidance. The current guideline for creating articles with a bot is set out at WP:MASSCREATION meaning consensus is required to ensure that they comply with Wikipedia's guidelines.
Proponents of bot generated articles point to the fact that a bot can create large numbers of articles that are correctly formatted without constant oversight and are less likely to make errors providing they are programmed correctly. Opponents of bot generated articles point to articles being bland and uninformative and bots that do make errors or create articles of dubious notability.
What could be created by bot
There is a limited number of things that are suitable for automatic creation. In all cases:
In 2002, Rambot created articles on 33,000 U.S. settlements from census data at rate of thousands per day. However, an error occurred in about 2,000 of those articles, which caused significant headaches.
Prior to 2012, ClueBot II, created articles on ~20,000 asteroids from NASA but most were eventually found to be non-notable and redirected. This led to the creation of WP:NASTRO and WP:AST2000 in particular.
Lsjbot created several articles on species on the Swedish, Cebuano, Dutch, and Waray Wikipedias, to the point where the majority of articles on some of those have been bot-created.
