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Study Reveals Bot-On-Bot Editing Wars Raging On Wikipedia's Pages (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years. Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply "bots," that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks. In the early days, the bots were so rare they worked in isolation. But over time, the number deployed on the encyclopedia exploded with unexpected consequences. The more the bots came into contact with one another, the more they became locked in combat, undoing each other's edits and changing the links they had added to other pages. Some conflicts only ended when one or other bot was taken out of action. The findings emerged from a study that looked at bot-on-bot conflict in the first ten years of Wikipedia's existence. The researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute in London examined the editing histories of pages in 13 different language editions and recorded when bots undid other bots' changes. While some conflicts mirrored those found in society, such as the best names to use for contested territories, others were more intriguing. Describing their research in a paper entitled Even Good Bots Fight in the journal Plos One, the scientists reveal that among the most contested articles were pages on former president of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf, the Arabic language, Niels Bohr and Arnold Schwarzenegger. One of the most intense battles played out between Xqbot and Darknessbot which fought over 3,629 different articles between 2009 and 2010. Over the period, Xqbot undid more than 2,000 edits made by Darknessbot, with Darknessbot retaliating by undoing more than 1,700 of Xqbot's changes. The two clashed over pages on all sorts of topics, from Alexander of Greece and Banqiao district in Taiwan to Aston Villa football club.
I'd rather see some Bot on Bot anal sex. First we will need to create bots so sophisticated that they have functioning anuses. It will advance the state of the art!
As a troll, I'm upset my job is being automated away.
What's next, bums will be automated?
Table-ized A.I.
No one told the bots that the election was over?
A younger inexperienced Indian chief was wondering how much firewood he needed to gather for the winter. He was not like the chiefs in the past that could tell from the clouds and stuff like that.
He decided to make his people gather tons of firewood, more than they usually gather just to be safe. The young chief was still curious though so he decided to call the weather service people.
They said that it was supposed to be a pretty cold winter, colder than most years. So the young chief made his people gather more firewood. They were getting pretty tired.
Again the chief called the weather service and they said that it was suppose to be even colder. So the Indians went back to wood cutting, and were getting even more tired. Some were even ill and there hands were rubbed raw and blistered. They had to build a whole other hut for all of the firewood which took even more wood to build.
Once again the chief called, and the weather service said that there may be another ice age. The chief asked him how they could tell all of this and he simply replied, "Because the Indians are gathering firewood like crazy!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...