I agree they're all bot-ish, but in the context of Wikipedia, I think it's useful to distinguish. Possibly not for the audience of the original article, but they do pretty different things.
Heuristic reactive bots are an interesting component of the human/machine hybrid "Wikipedia immune system" that keeps most encyclopedia articles non-vandalized most of the time, despite that seeming implausible at first (the most surprising thing about Wikipedia, if you've ever run any other wiki, is that it doesn't get totally full of spam and garbage within hours).
Others are more like content-import scripts, running once; Rambot falls into that category. And still others are closer to external implementations of functionality that MediaWiki is missing internally. For example, MediaWiki lacks a "rename category" function, so there are helper bots that will "rename" categories by mass-removing every article in the category and mass-adding it to the new category.
Heuristic reactive bots are an interesting component of the human/machine hybrid "Wikipedia immune system" that keeps most encyclopedia articles non-vandalized most of the time, despite that seeming implausible at first (the most surprising thing about Wikipedia, if you've ever run any other wiki, is that it doesn't get totally full of spam and garbage within hours).
Others are more like content-import scripts, running once; Rambot falls into that category. And still others are closer to external implementations of functionality that MediaWiki is missing internally. For example, MediaWiki lacks a "rename category" function, so there are helper bots that will "rename" categories by mass-removing every article in the category and mass-adding it to the new category.