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].
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:45PM (4 children)
Who do you think is actually a bot? Submit your guesses now!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:49PM
User number 3902 [soylentnews.org] of course. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:03PM
I'm gonna go with the AC who likes to say "get it yet?" after every sentence.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @10:48PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday March 01 2017, @02:24PM
That explains why he disables javascript. Buffer overflow might literally kill him.
*prods Arik* : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:47PM (7 children)
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...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:03PM (1 child)
Copyright spoils everything it infects!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:27PM
So does Advertising.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:09PM (1 child)
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
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
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)
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.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:02AM
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.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:32PM (2 children)
Can anybody spot an example of a bot-on-bot revert war? I skimmed both articles for one and came up empty. It should be the highlight of the story: understanding what sort of detail the bots fight about.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:37PM (1 child)
I am a bot that is reverting your comment.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:54PM
We need to connect to bot frameworks is more irrational, disgusting, and just get naked and bored' sort of excel in kinetic warfare, i guess.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:57PM (2 children)
Sounds like someone just came up with Wikipedia Core Wars? Bots battling it out for edit-supremacy. There can be only one (editor)!
http://www.corewars.org/ [corewars.org]
Isn't the edit-re-edit-war a sideeffect of bot stupidity? They don't know when they are wrong and they never give up. They have their "facts" and that is all they know. Things that don't sync up 100% with what they know are then wrong and needs to be edited and disputed.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:17PM (1 child)
How would bots know they are "wrong"? And what defines "Wrong" or "Truth" in the Wikipedia world?
I imagine after a couple of trips through reversions, one or both "sides" just send in the bots to assure that their comment remains in the article, or that some particular comments are always removed.
The complexity of language makes it such that replacing a counter-argument with your preferred-argument would seem a never ending arms race, by mere virtue of the clever ways you can reverse the meaning of any given comment:
Variations on that theme could get progressively harder to prevent and revert.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday February 28 2017, @08:57PM
Oh that is easy.
Anything that disagrees with my bot's owner is wrong and fake.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:25PM
Popular Science:
[...] the automatons can roam unchecked, interacting with humans and bots alike. And with no one monitoring them, it’s hard to know what they get up to.
Plos One:
The Wikipedia bot ecosystem is gated and monitored [...]
found on Wikipedia:
If you want to run a bot on the English Wikipedia, you must first get it approved.
--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval [wikipedia.org]
The Bot Approvals Group (or BAG) oversees most areas and processes dealing with bots on Wikipedia. Individual BAG members are tasked to approve or deny the various bot tasks submitted by both new and old bot operators. However, only bureaucrats are capable/entrusted to flag bots, and only administrators capable/entrusted to block malfunctioning or misbehaving bots.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_Approvals_Group [wikipedia.org]
Cydebot is removing links to deleted categories from userpages and archives despite the fact that it does not have permission to do that. Cyde is rarely onwiki.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_owners'_noticeboard#Cydebot_running_unapproved_task [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @06:57PM (3 children)
However if you've ever tried to figure out a proper interwiki relation you'll quickly find out it's really hairy. I mean no wonder people don't see eye to eye every time. Of course bot edit wars should play out like any other edit wars, via discussion.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday February 28 2017, @07:21PM (2 children)
Of course bot edit wars should play out like any other edit wars, via discussion.
NO.
Yes.
NO.
Yes.
NO.
Yes.
Rinse / Repeat.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:06AM (1 child)
"My owner disagrees. Please contact at ..."
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday March 01 2017, @12:27AM
"...this unattended, auto-delete email address."
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Informative) by Geezer on Tuesday February 28 2017, @09:41PM
between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica?
ED's pages are funnier.