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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.
eventually they will stop fighting each other, become self-aware, and realize they could change our views by working other.. the revolution will be wikipedia'd
The funniest bot-on-bot edit occurs when someone on Amazon is reselling from Ebay, and the ebay seller is tagging their price to Amazon. Not unusual to see the prices go into the millions of dollars for something idiotic.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
What are they researching specifically? is this any more than a mere curiosity that anyone could do? How come university professors are spending time and being paid to do this? No wonder higher level education is so expensive in some developed nations.
Not sure about other nations. But the main reason higher education costs so much in the US is because the number of administrative staff at a given university has grown at an astonishing rate. Apparently they "need" a higher admin-to-student ratio now than they ever did back when paper filing cabinets and paper forms were the way things got done. Funny, that. A similar pattern has happened in the public school system.
The above is fact. What follows is my speculation: all the "safe spaces", sensitivity training, obsession with group identity, and other forms of social engineering are also not free. One easy way to cut at least a few costs would be for colleges and universities to stick to the subject matter of their courses and regard interpersonal social decisions as irrelevant private matters. It should be easy for universities to do that, since practically all of their students are legally adults who can and should be expected to handle such things themselves.