Slashdot Mirror
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
Not me. I get enough of bots fucking me over in the stock market, at the bank, and in my email box.
As a troll, I'm upset my job is being automated away.
What's next, bums will be automated?
Table-ized A.I.
Don't these bots have maintainers? Don't the maintainers know what their bots are doing?
I've written forum bots. I've run multiple bots in the same forum. I let the bots interact with each other but I put in safeguards to make sure they can't ever fight.
Bots are like children, and when they fight, the adults step in to break up the fight.
Is the real news here, Wikipedia is full of irresponsible idiot "elite" coderz who have no fucking clue?
No one told the bots that the election was over?
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.
Here's a better summary copy-pasted from the article as the one copy-pasted from The Guardian article is shit *.
* The Guardian, directly quoted in the summary is doing random edits and seems to be incapable of high-lighting the main points. Case in point. The article has the following quote:
While The Guardian sees it fit to shorten this to:
Note how the order of the list stays the same and how Pervez Musharraf is explained with the same words ("former president of Pakistan"). It seems obvious that the journalist has copy-pasted the sentence and then proceeded to remove references to Uzbekistan, Estonia, and Belarus. This edit strikes me as odd. Why remove those bit while leaving the others. What's more, the article has selected the examples carefully to highlight their main point (you won't find anything resembling it from the The Guardian article):
not the bots. Do not forget that Wikipedia is one of the most visited and read websites. And where there are people there are possibilities to make money.
Consequently a class of technological aristocracy appear who try to control what article could be published and which could be deleted. We shall not underestimate human creativity on a market.
All one needs is a capability to create and maintain a positive article about say a medicament which development cost a billion. But it is impossible if you cannot dominate other people' articles. It is not so visible in English Wikipedia, but mostly in some other popular languages.
Not according to our new wikipedia bot overlords.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
This paper comes from the Alan Turing institute, which is nationally funded, not university-funded. The actual paper does indeed deal with data-science, and data-science is a pretty important thing. Here, Wikipedia is being treated as a microcosm of inter-cultural/inter-domain bot-script interactions.
What?
Not having the schools in charge of living arrangements does nothing to solve the problem of colleges creating unreal bubbles for their students?
Living off campus further reduces the authority of the schools. Now they can only build 'safe spaces' around classrooms. No more _stupid_ 'no alcohol', 'no guns', 'no saying mean things' in people's living spaces. If someone wants to live in an all female or all black environment all they have to do is make it happen. Eliminating the pernicious effect of having schools run discriminatory housing for only some classes of people. Freedom of association is restored. Women have got to love having sorority 'sisters' with 'five o'clock shadow' and 'man hands'.
Off campus frats are universally the crazy ones. Which is a good thing. They deal with real consequences, but not campus bullshit. Assuming you are an adult, would you tolerate typical 21st century campus rules in your house?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'