Swingbot Reads Wikipedia

Posted August 23rd, 2009

We’ve been working for a while now on Swingbot, a fearless automaton who helps add data to SwingVine.

Now you can see one of Swingbot’s first new capabilities: it reads Wikipedia. For casual users, this means there’s a lot more data on the site. In fact, we’ve gone from 170K to 1.3M topic pages on SwingVine. For contributors, this means less time entering mundane data (like all 20 tracks for an album) and more time doing fun stuff, like leaving opinions or sharing content.

One note: When you view certain pages, you may see a waiting screen for a few seconds as Swingbot grabs information about the topic in real time from Wikipedia. This only happens the first time you look at a specific page on SwingVine and helps us conserve valuable computational resources until real users like you demonstrate interest in a piece of content.

We hope you find the new data useful. The only question now is: What will Swingbot read next?