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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [plos.org] on Thursday in the journal PLOS ONE.

Source: Popular Science [popsci.com]

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