What is impressive about Wikipedia is that information is updated so quickly.
Any big event, like a death of a celebrity or whatever, it'll appear on there quicker than some news sites.
I'm just wondering though, Wikipedia also keeps current information that is relatively minor.
For example, this is the page of Roger Federer. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_federer )
Now he's a high profile tennis player but he's not really famous for his double's record. Nevertheless, his current doubles ranking is displayed.
So my question is, is his current doubles ranking just updated manually by someone every time it changes or is there some sort of automated process that Wikipedia sources this data from somewhere in order to update this statistic?
Best Answer
Some parts of the Wikipedia are edited by bots. They are special scripts that can do extensive but unintelligent editing, such as updating links to other language wiki pages automatically.
This kind of information rich updates are created by real users. There are a lot of dedicated users on Wikipedia and most of these users constantly follow certain articles and constantly update the content. Commonly these dedicated users are experts, enthusiasts or professionals on the articles they edit.
You can examine the history page for the Roger Federer article to keep track of changes. Generally bots leave a special comment to the edits they make. So you can easily distinguish between a bot and a real editor.