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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the rock-'em-sock-'em-wikibots dept.

Source: Popular Science:

Bots waging war for years on end, silently and endlessly arguing over tiny details on Wikipedia is, let's be honest, pretty funny. Automatons with vendettas against each other? Come on.

But as amusing as the idea is, anthropomorphizing bot wars ignores what's actually important about their arguments: we didn't know they were happening. Bots account for large chunks of the internet's activity, yet we know relatively little about how they all interact with each other. They're just released into the World Wide Jungle to roam free. And given that they account for over half of all web traffic, we should probably know more about them. Especially since these warring bots weren't even malicious—they were benevolent.

A group of researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute looked at nine years' worth of data on Wikipedia's bots and found that even the helpful ones spent a lot of time contradicting each other. And more specifically, there were pairs of bots that spent years doing and undoing the same changes repeatedly. The researchers published their findings on Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Our results show that, although in quantitatively different ways, bots on Wikipedia behave and interact as unpredictably and as inefficiently as the humans. The disagreements likely arise from the bottom-up organization of the community, whereby human editors individually create and run bots, without a formal mechanism for coordination with other bot owners. Delving deeper into the data, we found that most of the disagreement occurs between bots that specialize in creating and modifying links between different language editions of the encyclopedia. The lack of coordination may be due to different language editions having slightly different naming rules and conventions.

From the PLOS ONE Journal article (Open Access article CC Attribution License -- See Spoiler.)

Copyright: © 2017 Tsvetkova et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

In support of this argument, we also found that the same bots are responsible for the majority of reverts in all the language editions we study. For example, some of the bots that revert the most other bots include Xqbot, EmausBot, SieBot, and VolkovBot, all bots specializing in fixing inter-wiki links. Further, while there are few articles with many bot-bot reverts (S7 Fig), these articles tend to be the same across languages. For example, some of the articles most contested by bots are about Pervez Musharraf (former president of Pakistan), Uzbekistan, Estonia, Belarus, Arabic language, Niels Bohr, Arnold Schwarzenegger. This would suggest that a significant portion of bot-bot fighting occurs across languages rather than within. In contrast, the articles with most human-human reverts tend to concern local personalities and entities and tend to be unique for each language [26].


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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:47PM (7 children)

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:47PM (#472851) Homepage

    From the PLOS ONE Journal article (Open Access article CC Attribution License -- See Spoiler.)

    Copyright: © 2017 Tsvetkova et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

    Dammit, now you ruined the end of it for me.

    On a less silly note, what's with the weird time-delayed disappearing/reappearing spoiler?

    Would've taken up less space just to print the whole thing in the first place, too...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:03PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:03PM (#472866)

    Copyright spoils everything it infects!

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:27PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:27PM (#473042) Journal

      So does Advertising.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:09PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:09PM (#472874)

    He was nice enough to put it in a spoiler tag, but you just threw it out there in a quote tag. Thanks a lot, you insensitive clod. ;)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:30PM (#472890)

      He did, however, make a slight change.

      Unlike in the spoiler in the summary, "Copyright" is not in boldface.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:32PM (#472892)

    I agree it should disappear instantly when you mouse out, but the mouse over delay is there to prevent accidentally revealing the spoiler if you didn't mean to hover.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:59PM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:59PM (#472965) Journal

    Dammit, now you ruined the end of it for me.
    On a less silly note, what's with the weird time-delayed disappearing/reappearing spoiler?
    Would've taken up less space just to print the whole thing in the first place, too...

    Is this the purpose of spoilers? I thought it was a place to hide plot give-away for books, stories, or movies.

    BTAIM: this brings up a Pet Peeve of mine, one which I try to avoid when submitting stories, but which Aurther and the other bots just copy verbatim into the story.

    To Wit: the long an boring TL;DR of reciting the authors and their university affiliations, and other associated drivel embedded in stories. I kind of like the way @Fnord666 did it, embedding this stuff into the spoiler tag. There if you want it, out of the way if you don't. The Story reads so much better.

    Maybe we would be better off with an "attribution" tag that works like the spoiler tag and that way we can encourage more consistent treatment of the necessary but annoying embedded who and where stuff.

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    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:02AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:02AM (#473128)

      How do I tell if it's something I want to read if it's in a spoiler? If it's laid out plainly I can see what it's going to be and then skip it.

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