<i>The bots do make mistakes, however, if they encounter a new circumstance their programming cannot account for. ClueBot NG, the anti-vandalism bot, has a small rate of false positives - edits it mistakes for vandalism, but which are in fact legitimate.</i><p><i>Since Wikipedia closely tracks edits, however, mistakes can be repaired almost as quickly as they happened, administrators say.</i><p>I think fairly consistent commentary over the years demonstrates that this is patently false. Deletionists are capricious and arbitrary, reversals are beauracratic, complex and lengthy (if even possible) It dissapoints me to think about how much legitimate human knowledge has been wiped from WP, the authors discouraged and WP made poorer for it.
Just some complementary information, extracted from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots</a> (very interesting for those that didn't know much about the role of bots in the wikipedia).<p>Over 60 million edit operations have been performed by bots on the English Wikipedia.<p>Some bot examples are: <i>Yobot</i>, that categorizes individuals in categories by birth date, profession and other criteria, <i>SineBot</i>, that signs comments left on talk pages, <i>MiszaBot</i>, that archives talk pages, <i>Xqbot</i>, that solves double redirects, ...<p>Some bots, like <i>RussBot</i> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RussBot" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RussBot</a>) have big red <i>Emergency bot shutoff</i> button.
<i>one called rambot created about 30,000 articles - at a rate of thousands per day - on individual towns in the US</i><p>Umm, no, someone wrote a script and ran it. This article massively overestimates what a "bot" is.