No bots were harmed in the writing of this article.

There are a startling 1,862 bots at large on Wikipedia.^[2] If the world has any fear of AI, then the robo-cide should probably begin here. There is suspicion that a few of these bots are included in the count of the 5,000 most active editors. It's uncertain whether this is true or not, but it does make you wonder – who are they and what do they do? (In plain English, please.) Scripts are somewhat comprehensible, HTML makes sense – bot but why so many? Do they ever have their own bot-like edit-wars? Has a bot ever become a sock of another bot? Who needs administrators or ArbCom when bots could do the same things (without mercy)? Many bots possess human qualities and foibles. Short descriptions of the most interesting ones include:

• Botnet – the scary, big, and bad, bot boss.
• BotTheBuilder – created with a child-like personality. This bot will automatically leave a message on all the talk pages of articles on heavy machinery that optimistically states: "Yes we can!"
• Bots n Panz – assembles topics for a new WikiProject: Domestication of Men. Two articles have been tagged for assessment for this project so far. These are What women want men to do in the kitchen and You never listen.

• orangeBot – has the tedious job of sorting through the Knock-knock joke articles, assessing their humor, and adding the speedy deletion template to tag the article page: pointless since every knock-knock joke get the speedy deletion tag. Orange you glad this bot is around? This bot was created by the self-identified German participants on the talk page.
• Bots!! – is a massively multiplayer bot and "uses nProtect GameGuard but because of its method of actuation, similar to a rootkit, it is criticized for being extremely invasive."^[3] It was created in March 2006, so its a little slow and pixelated. This bot was licensed to Playdom. Then Disney purchased it^[4] from Playdom for $763 million. The Korean version is called BOUT!!
• Bots – easily confused with the former bot. Though named after a band, it is able to translate Dutch articles into English.

• Botswana – A place where bots 'wanna' retire.

• Wilf Bott, Richard Bott, Mark Bott, Leon Bott and John Bott – takes articles on soccer players,^[5] skeleton players,^[6] cricketeers,^[7] and rugby^[8] players and tags them as stubs. This is pretty pointless since all amateur sports players are stubs anyway.
• RaoulBott – a Hungarian-American mathematician best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem.
• JackBot and Jillbot – pretty useful in filling out the biography parameter "| married for money = <!--answer with yes, no, probably-->".
• HotBot - a special project of the editors active in the WP:WikiProject Food and Drink. They use it to extract recipes from food and drink articles, deposit them into Wikibooks and expand them into recipes that have all the ingredients in metric and annoying American quantities. It also will transform a recipe that is designed to feed a family of four into other quantities, kinda like the loaves and fishes miracle.
  • HotCrockBot – a subsidiary of HotBot but only creates wikibook recipes for things that can be braised.
• CrackBot – this particular bot is a little touchy and hangs out on just a few different article pages. It has some helper scripts with their own names: KISS, Tea time, and IceChat.
  • UKcrackbot – the UK has some pretty great place names. This bot doesn't do a darn thing except watch the others work.
  • Crackbot cave – a script that used to help disambiguate bat and cave topics. It got gummed up and was decomissioned when it didn't know how to handle Knee-wrecker Passage and Beans and Bacon mine.
  • crackBotHall, a landmark ruin near Keld, North Yorkshire.
  • LittleCrakBot, this bot leaves messages on talk pages for unusually curt editors who are notoriously contentious.
  • Crackbot theory, well there are quite a few of these and somewhat difficult to describe.
• BotBound – a favorite in WP:WikiProject Botany because it will flag the articles of those plants whose roots tend to rot.
• PainInDaBot – – a bot that keeps a count of new editors who are treated this way by cranky editors with lots of edits to their name.
• PotBot – scavenges WP looking for articles that contain the word "Cannabis" and inserts these articles into this template. It is not entirely predictable. But it seems totally relaxed, euphoric, can't fall asleep, talks too fast, is always hungry, has the jitters, is anxious, paranoid, introspective, and makes pompous philosophical declarations. It also tends to loop a lot.^[9][10]